Cyera Doubles Valuation With $540M Raise for AI Data Defense

A startup founded by a longtime Israeli Military Intelligence leader raised $540 million to enable secure artificial intelligence adoption by helping organizations understand and control their data.

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New York-based Cyera said the Series E investment will be used to help organizations understand risks, behaviors and control actions across data systems, said Chief Strategy Officer Jason Clark. The funding will be directed toward Cyera’s data security posture management and data loss prevention capabilities as well as on-premises integrations, identity intelligence for AI agents, and a centralized correlation and analytics engine to help understand risks.

“AI is not just a wave. It’s a tsunami,” Clark told Information Security Media Group. “We’re just well-positioned, so we basically got preempted. ‘All the signals look really, really good. We want you guys to be in a position to move even faster and accelerate more on finding the key talent, on opening new locations, getting into new countries, and to acquire more people from an acquisition standpoint.'”

Cyera, founded in 2021, employs 722 people and has raised more than $1.3 billion in funding. The company inked a $6 billion valuation, double the $3 billion valuation associated with Cyera’s $300 million Series D round that closed less than seven months ago in November. Cyera co-founder and CEO Yotam Segev spent nearly a decade in the Israeli military, and rose to become head of Unit 8200’s cyber department (see: Data Protection Startup Cyera Raises $300M on $3B Valuation).

Why Investors Are Doubling Down on Data Security

Clark said investors such as Georgian, Greenoaks, and Lightspeed Venture Partners were drawn by Cyera’s ability to securely enable AI adoption through data visibility, protection and governance. Investors approached the company with strong interest in acquiring adjacent technologies and scaling product delivery based on impressive growth metrics, including pipeline growth 150% above forecast, he said.

“The only way CISOs are getting any funding is if it has something to do with enabling the company to use AI,” Clark said. “And ultimately that means that they need to be able to securely know their data, and then securely put that data into the model and then know what data is in what senses in the models, and then how to securely allow people access to that data in some type of controlled manner.”

Traditional cybersecurity has focused heavily on threats, vulnerabilities and identities, while data – the very asset cybersecurity exists to protect – has remained an underdeveloped domain, Clark said. Cyera’s platform changes that by enabling organizations to locate, classify and protect their data with the precision required to integrate AI into critical business functions securely and responsibly, Clark said.

“There’s never been a true data security platform that can solve end-to-end the problem,” Clark said. “And so, there’s significant excitement over, ‘Hey, this is the biggest problem in cybersecurity, and there’s now a company that’s been funded enough and has proven through customer adoption that it works.'”

Cyera plans to enhance its foundational DSPM layer by improving classification accuracy from 98% to 100%, and extend its coverage from data at rest to data in motion and use by building on its acquisition of Trail. The company wants to understand how humans and machines interact with data, especially as AI agents start behaving like employees, and create an intelligence layer that correlates signals, he said.

“What we’re doing is we’re putting all this extra context into a data lake warehouse,” Clark said. “It’s kind of like an intelligence hub. And then what we’ve done is, now we’re layering in SIEM technology on top of that.”

Securing On-Premises Data and AI Agents

Enterprises still store vast amounts of critical data on-prem, and Clark said these organizations now face the challenge of identifying what on-prem data is suitable to feed into AI models hosted in the cloud. Cyera is architecting solutions that offload heavy processing to the cloud while maintaining secure hooks into on-prem storage, helping customers without a full cloud footprint analyze, cleanse and move data.

“You’re not just able to just light up 1,000 workloads to go scan something really, really fast,” Clark said. “You’re relying on the compute of that EMC storage device, right? It has a CPU, and you’re relying on that CPU to give you the answers back from its log. So, you’re just a little bit more infrastructure-constrained.”

Cyera is expanding its identity capabilities to accommodate autonomous or semi-autonomous AI processes that act on behalf of users, which raise complex questions about access control, behavior validation and auditability. Cyera is building tools to understand behavioral context from AI identities, with the ability to challenge or interrogate an AI agent’s actions, just as one would question a human.

“We want to create these AI agents and have them have logins to Workday and to Active Directory, and have them act as a human and even give them a name,” Clark said. “The company doesn’t necessarily know that they’re engaging with an agent. ‘Well, if that agent got compromised by a bad actor, or the agent started asking for extra rights, I need to know how much you know.'”

Cyera’s analytics engine is designed to act as a natural language-driven intelligence layer, enabling security teams to ask complex questions such as, “Who has access to the most sensitive data?” or “Which user accounts have accessed from abroad recently?” – and get the answers. The engine uses SIEM technology and AI to deliver results, suggest remediation and even generate executive presentations.

“It’s literally blowing people’s minds what we can do,” Clark said. “And we’re showing it to customers now. We just kind of soft-launched it because we want to do something much bigger come Black Hat.”