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Cyera, the Israel-founded, U.S.-based cybersecurity unicorn that uses artificial intelligence to build what’s known as data security posture management — a full assessment and picture of where a customers’ data has been created, where it is stored, and how it is used — has been on a growth tear in the last year, picking up business as breaches have continued to emerge across a growing number of enterprises and other large organizations. Now Cyera is taking the next steps in its expansion with its first acquisition and a major fundraise on the horizon.
The startup is acquiring Trail Security, a startup that was still in stealth mode building solutions for data loss prevention — essentially technology complementary to posture management to help secure data in the event of a breach. Cyera is paying $162 million for Trail in a mix of cash and shares, Cyera’s CEO and co-founder Yotam Segev told TechCrunch in an interview.
Cyera has been building up an impressive list of customers across major industries like healthcare, communications and financial services (they decline to name names but notably one of their investors in AT&T), so there is revenue coming in. It also still has some money in the bank from previous fundraises. Most recently, Cyera picked up a $300 million Series C at a $1.4 billion valuation in April 2024.
But soon it will soon be getting more. We have also confirmed with sources close to the matter that Cyera is in the process of raising at least $200 million at a pre-money valuation of around $3 billion. Cyera declined to comment on fundraising.
The deal will help Cyera bulk up its offerings to meet demands from customers to handle the longer process that comes after posture management engagement, namely also to offer a more complete suite of services compared to others in the field. Competitors to Cyera include CrowdStrike, Zscaler, Rubrik, Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and Fortinet.
Trail is a relatively young company — it was just one year old and still operating in stealth mode, as you can see by its sparse website and the fact that Zohar Wittenberg, the CEO and co-founder, hadn’t even had a chance to make the company ‘LinkedIn official.’ But in fact, it had quietly already raised $35 million in funding, Segev told me, including a Series A from Lightspeed, CRV, and Cyberstarts — the early-stage backer that’s invested in a whole wave of big-name Israeli cybersecurity companies, including Wiz and Cyera.
It had some momentum, so why throw in the towel so fast? Wittenberg told me it was for two main reasons.
First, it’s the state of the security market, where buyers are currently favouring platform plays — with ‘all in one’ offerings, over point solutions.
“We think we’re building the best product in the category, but I think the customers wanted to buy data loss protection and data security posture management as one platform,” Wittenberg said in an interview. “We can leverage the DSPM side and build it better.”
The second reason is that Segev and Wittenberg have known each other for years, going back to school, and it felt like an easy choice to make for both sides when it came to a culture fit.
Cyera’s focus going forward is going to be to continue enhancing its own technology — AI might be the startup’s own instrument of choice for gathering and protecting data, but it’s also the weapon of choice a lot of malicious hackers are using to figure out innovative ways to breach networks — but it’s also going to be making more acquisitions going forward, Segev told TechCrunch, to address growing demands from customers to to more.
“You have no idea how many times a month I get a phone call from a CISO asking delicately for some time,” Segev told me back in April. “‘I’ve got something going on,’ they say. ‘I need you. How fast can you guys scan my environment?’ It happens every time. And what we do is, we jump on it. We send a squad, we have them figure out what data was in scope. They sometimes don’t even know what data was breached.”
Trail has 40 employees and all of them are joining Cyera.
