Cloud security was broken. We’re fixing it.

Avi Shua

Published:

Dec 08, 2020

Reading time:

4 Minutes

Abstract: We’re proud to announce a 55M USD series B financing round led by ICONIQ Capital, bringing overall Orca Security funding to over $82M since its inception less than two years ago. This new injection of funds will enable us to accelerate our efforts to continue providing the worlds’ most innovative cloud security platform.

 

There wasn’t a dull moment these past few months. Since we announced our Round A seven months ago, we’ve more than doubled our team. While not easy—especially with everyone working from home—we had no alternative. Market demand for our platform left us no choice.

On top of securing our customers’ environment, our research team used the power of SideScanning technology to scan thousands of virtual appliances, helping hundreds of organizations (Dell, Cisco, IBM, Symantec, Splunk, Oracle, to name a few) to improve the security posture of their solutions and increase public visibility of issues in thousands of shipped software products. We chose to market Orca Security based on factual, hands-on product comparisons, and took a stance when Palo Alto Networks tried using legal threats to take down a product comparison, instead of accepting our findings and improving its offering.

Today, I’m excited to announce closing of a financing round led by ICONIQ Capital’s tech focused growth equity investment platform, ICONIQ Growth. With over $9 billion in capital commitments, ICONIQ Growth leverages ICONIQ Capital’s unique ecosystem of founders and thought leaders to help further their companies’ success and has made numerous investments in leading cloud companies. ICONIQ is joined in this round with participation from our existing investors—YL Ventures, GGV Capital, and SVCI—a group of CISOs who put their own money in Orca. They share our vision for cloud security that actually works, and we’re honored to work with them. This funding will help us to accelerate our product development and support growing demand for our platform.

Orca Security was founded with the vision that cloud security tools need to maximize the ‘3 Cs,’ as we call them:

  • Comprehensive – You need to see it all. It doesn’t make sense to cobble together distinct tools for cloud security posture management, compliance assessments, and workload and data protection. You need to detect it all from a single perch: vulnerabilities, malware, lateral movement risk, unsecured customer data, over-permissive roles, deviations from compliance frameworks, and many more.
  • Coverage without friction – Coverage is paramount for protection. If a security tool can be effectively deployed on only 40, 60, or even 80 percent of your environment, it’s virtually useless. Seasoned security professionals know that unprotected assets are prime targets for attackers.
  • Contextualized risk assessment – Imagine yourself managing the security posture of Fort Knox. You hire an external auditor to assess your security, and they report your top risk is a broken lock protecting a janitorial supply closet in some internal room—the weakest lock found. This is absurd, because risk is never composed solely of the severity of the underlying issue (broken lock). Rather, it includes its exposure (who can attack it) and potential breach impact (what will happen if it gets breached). In this case, exposure is minimal—it’s internal and the impact is negligible.
    In cyber security, we unfortunately make this mistake often, prioritizing solely based on severity of underlying issues— completely neglecting the exposure and potential breach impact (“blast radius”). This results in alert fatigue among analysts and their ignoring risks that actually mean something.

Orca Security makes such challenges a thing of the past. We’ve built the worlds’ most comprehensive security platform, encompassing in one solution capabilities usually achieved using 3 – 5 distinct tools. With our unique, patent-pending SideScanning™ technology we’re providing 100% workload-deep coverage in minutes, using a one-time, read-only, impact-free integration process. And most importantly, we’re usually surfacing 3 – 4 orders of magnitude fewer critical alerts than competitive products. We do this by building a graph of your environment, prioritizing risk based not solely on the severity of underlying issues, but also taking into account their exposure and corresponding blast radius.

Orca for Existing Solutions

We, as an industry, have collectively learned that the lift and shift approach to the cloud is the wrong tactic. While it may work in the short term, the outcome is always suboptimal. The cloud is materially different from on-premise environments – and deserves better than iterating on agent based solutions that were never meant for the cloud. We’re here to provide that alternative.

Avi has more than 25 years of experience in cybersecurity. Prior to co-founding Orca Security, Avi was the chief technologist at Check Point Software Technologies and held key positions within Unit 8200, the Israeli NSA. While at Check Point, he built and scaled cybersecurity solutions that continue to protect tens of thousands of organizations to this day. Avi believes that cybersecurity products should always support the organization and not the other way around.

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