Cyera’s Series B – as Ground-breaking as Our AI-powered Platform

Two weeks ago, we announced our $100 million series B investment, led by Accel. Our strong partners Sequoia and Cyberstarts, and new investor Redpoint Ventures also participated in the round. This level of investment sends a clear signal about the path Cyera is on and is a testament to our powerful vision and execution to revolutionize data security.

I am excited about this investment because it allows us to move even faster. It’s incredible to think that we only emerged from stealth in March of last year. In that short time we have provided value to dozens of enterprises. Each of those companies realized the need for a new approach. They had the foresight to adopt Cyera’s breakthrough technology, and we are incredibly thankful for their support.

For the past decade, data security has needed to change. Legacy tools created silos and divisions inside of enterprises. They were built on outdated assumptions that were made obsolete by cloud technologies. Cyera’s foundationally different approach was architected for the cloud era. Our time in Unit 8200 taught Yotam and I that modern data security must be built on a foundation of artificial intelligence and automation. Our early engagements with CISOs and their teams focused us on building an operational platform to secure data everywhere.

AI-powered Classification is required to know your data

The traditional purpose of a signature is to create a permanent attachment between a document and the signer. This form of self-identification was designed to attach ownership. However in the digital era, most businesses moved away from signatures, at least in the physical world. When it comes to digital business in the cloud era, signatures represent the past. Despite this, an entire data security ecosystem has been built around detecting, classifying, and identifying data using signatures! 

Today, a static pattern cannot represent the complexity or fluidity of a document or piece of data. That is why, from our inception, Cyera has been using artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify and classify data. Cyera’s data research team uses public training data and deep expertise to create our AI-powered data insights. This provides customers with faster results, more precise classification, and deep business context on the intended use of data. 

The difference is clear:

We recently integrated with Azure OpenAI to provide even more data to our models. And with this series B announcement, we will grow our research and development teams to add even more AI-powered capabilities to the platform. 

Cloud-native, not cloud only

Cloud technologies have accelerated global innovation and collaboration. However the shared responsibility model puts the onus on CISOs to secure their data. This keeps some businesses from adopting cloud technologies. It also means that some data will never migrate to the cloud. 

Cyera has taken a cloud-native approach to data security. This means that we are harnessing the speed, scale, and agility of the cloud. No agents, no overhead, no software or infrastructure maintenance. But cloud native doesn’t mean we are limiting our scope to the cloud. To be the enterprise data security platform, we must secure all of a company’s data. This investment will enable us to expand our platform to hosted datacenters and on-prem deployments.

Keeping data secure, everywhere

Data defense and compliance assurance are two core components in a CISO's role. Sprawling cloud technologies introduce significant challenges in these areas. Misconfigurations, unauthorized access, external sharing of data, and a lack of visibility continue to plague security teams. 

In the past year, Cyera has expanded our platform from IaaS (e.g. AWS, Azure, GCP), to DBaaS and PaaS (e.g. Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB Atlas), to SaaS (including M365 and Google Productivity Suite). We discover, classify, and secure structured and unstructured data across these environments on a unified platform. We will continue to extend our support for more datastores in these environments. This investment enables us to accelerate our coverage to more deployment models and environments. Cyera’s AI-powered data security platform will extend to code repositories, communications platforms, and anywhere an enterprise manages data.

I’m excited for the next phase in our growth. And even more excited to learn alongside our customers as we help them know their data, and keep it secure.