Cyera raises $100M to expand data security platform for AI-driven enterprises

Whitea data security firm, announced it has secured a $100 million Series B investment led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Sequoia AND Cyberstart. Redpoint Venture also joined as an investor.

With this latest funding round, Cyera has raised a total of $160 million since it exited stealth in March 2022. The company says its revenue has grown 800% over the past year as security teams prioritize to data security in hybrid cloud environments, especially among S&P 500 companies.

“Asuring $100 million in the current economic climate, where there have been many reports and analyzes highlighting funding shortages, markdowns and early exits, validates our vision and relentless execution to redefine asset security. data for the company,” Yotam Segev, co-founder and CEO of Cyera, told VentureBeat.

Segev said he has noticed a trend over the past year where legacy companies have attempted to adopt data security and posture management (DSPM) capabilities, despite significant limitations due to aging architectures. Instead, Cyera has made strategic investments to expand its AI-powered data security platform, focusing on enterprise-level data discovery, classification, and security.

“That’s how we’ve raised over $160 million to date,” he said. “The key difference with Cyera is the focus on really knowing what the data represents. Our platform was purpose-built to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning at cloud scale to dynamically discover, classify, and understand a company’s unique data.”

According to Segev, Cyera’s security platform distinguishes itself by going beyond data analysis through simple pattern recognition or threat signature detection. Instead, it actively and consistently identifies and draws inferences from the customer’s data environment.

He said this approach enables clients to gain a comprehensive understanding of their data, including the nature, meaning and underlying value it represents.

Segev emphasized that this feature improves security, simplifies compliance efforts, and enables organizations to adopt a data-driven approach. By leveraging their data effectively, companies can accelerate their operational processes and drive innovation.

Additionally, the platform automates remediation workflows to minimize the attack surface and ensure operational resiliency at the speed and scale of the cloud.

“Our process is fully automated, continuous and can be scheduled like any other modern development process (continuous integration / continuous delivery). Legacy vendors require manual efforts, and vendors of new cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications are all narrowly focused and creating more silos in the enterprise,” Segev told VentureBeat. “Cyera is designed and engineered to discover, classify, evaluate and secure all of a company’s data, anywhere”.

Leverage LLMs to help secure corporate data

Cyera’s platform uses large language models (LLM) to automatically detect, classify and protect sensitive data from various sources. A unified policy engine actively detects misconfigurations, suggests specific access controls, and generates new security policies to ensure compliance and regulate access to sensitive data.

“The Azure OpenAI integration is based on Cyera’s use of machine learning and large language models. Our LLMs can automatically distinguish roles (such as customers and employees), understand the origin and purpose of the data, and learn when the data can be used to identify an individual,” added Segev. “The platform then applies the right policies security, privacy, and compliance tools to discover and remediate exposures to structured and unstructured data wherever it’s managed.”

Segev said integrating OpenAI’s LLMs will enable security professionals to use natural language to align data stores, data classes and problems with the specific technical or business problem they plan to address.

For example, using semantic search, you can instantly identify issues that increase an organization’s risk of breach, such as the accessibility of protected health information (PHI) to unauthorized users.

Cyera said its unified policy engine can also detect misconfigurations, provide tailored access control recommendations, and generate new policies to govern data access.

“Cyera can answer fundamental questions about what data a business has, where it is located, who has access to it and who uses it, what exposes it to security, privacy and compliance risks, and how to remediate those risks, all from a single platform.” Segev explained. “This is unique because it provides a central, centralized location for every function in an enterprise to understand (if) appropriate controls are being applied over storage, management and usage.”

Prioritize data in the cloud

With the newly acquired funding, the company aims to accelerate the development of its cloud-native platform. Cyera said this initiative will enable security teams to effectively manage data security incidents, manage policies and controls, and streamline workflows across the entire data landscape.

“In addition to deep data insights and cloud-native architecture, we are also focusing on improvements to static posture (what DSPM stands for), real-time sensing and response to changes (Data Sense and Response, or DDR) , gaining less privileged access to data and recognizing misuse and anomalies in access (also known as Data Access Governance or DAG) and data privacy,” said Segev.

Segev says adopting this approach allows companies to prioritize data in their security strategy, streamline compliance checks and information requests (such as right to be forgotten or processing activity logs), and Ultimately, adopt a data-driven approach to address daily challenges and seize growth opportunities.

“During the implementation of Cyera, we immediately gained a complete picture of our cloud data landscape,” said Erik Bataller, vice president of security at ACV Auctions, in a written statement. “The platform showed us that we had a lot of ghost data that was not being accessed or used. Removing it will save us over $50,000 a year in cloud storage costs.”

To ensure the use of Generative AI, the company introduced SafeType, a browser extension designed to anonymize sensitive data entered into ChatGPT. SafeType proactively detects sensitive information and prevents its transmission to the gen AI platform.

When a user enters sensitive data into ChatGPT, SafeType promptly recognizes it and explains to the user why sharing such information is not recommended. It also offers options to anonymize the data or delete it from the session. The SafeType extension is available for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers and later White’s site.

“The software uses the permissive Apache 2.0 license, making it easy for developers to contribute to the project or use the code in their applications,” Segev told VentureBeat. “This is released in community preview and is not connected to Cyera’s data security platform, does not share code with the platform, or interacts with Cyera in any way.”

What is Cyera’s future?

Segev emphasized that Cyera aims to enable companies to harness the full power of their data through artificial intelligence. He said the recent investment validates Cyera’s dedication to assisting information security managers (CISOs) address their critical challenge of protecting data in the cloud era.

Segev said the additional funding will also accelerate the development of Cyera’s data security platform and support the expansion of its global go-to-market initiatives.

“We would not have been able to secure a $100 million round in this economic and financial environment without having a transformative impact on our customers’ data security programs. We aim to further solve critical problems for CISOs, holistically across their entire SaaS, PaaS and IaaS infrastructures,” said Segev. “This funding allows us to accelerate product development, hire the best engineering talent and expand our go-to-market initiatives. Our team is incredibly passionate about solving CISOs’ most pressing security challenges.”