Orca Security Wins $55M Round for Context-Aware Security

December 14, 2020

Orca Security bagged a $55 million Series B round led by ICONIQ Growth with participation from previous investors GGV Capital, YL Ventures, and Silicon Valley CISO Investments, supporting the company’s explosive growth with more than $82 million raised in less than two years. The funding will fuel Orca Security’s further disruption of the cloud security industry with touchless, workload-deep, context-aware security and compliance for AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

While competing cloud security solutions were built for on-prem environments, Orca Security was born in the cloud for the cloud. Orca treats each customer’s cloud estate as an interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on the underlying security issue combined with environmental context, including its accessibility and potential damage to the business. This context also helps to reduce thousands of security alerts to the critical few that matter, along with their precise path to remediation.

“Cloud security is fundamentally broken. Practitioners are forced to waste their time installing and maintaining security agents instead of managing actual security risks,” said Avi Shua, CEO and co-founder of Orca Security. “Even after spending years plumbing agents in their environment, coverage is usually limited to less than fifty percent. What’s worse, agent-based solutions lack context. They can’t see beyond individual issues residing on individual assets, which leads to a never-ending barrage of meaningless security alerts. The fact is, competing solutions view cloud resources as simple lists whereas bad actors see a graph with a clear path of attack. Orca Security changes that paradigm by visualizing cloud resources through the lens of an attacker.”

This unique ability is achieved using Orca Security’s patent-pending SideScanning™ technology, which reads the cloud configuration and workloads’ runtime block storage out-of-band to detect vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, weak and leaked passwords, secret keys, unsecured PII, and more. Orca Security has created the first cloud security solution that can meet these needs without agents or per asset integration, gaining full coverage literally within minutes.

Investing in the Future of Touchless, Workload-Deep, and Context-Aware Cloud Security

With its Series B round, in addition to a $20.5 million Series A and $6.5 million in seed funding, Orca Security is further expanding its cloud security and compliance capabilities. By the end of 2021, Orca Security plans to have nearly tripled its R&D team since its A round in May of 2020. It is also boosting its sales team to nearly 30 people to meet global product and customer demand. The company also plans to open new sales offices in the UK and Australia to serve the European and APAC markets.

The Series B funding round is being led by ICONIQ Growth, which invests in growing technology companies and employs a distinctive ecosystem to build enduring businesses. The funding also includes participating investments from GGV Capital, who led the Series A as a global venture capital firm focused on companies shaping digital transformations, and YL Ventures who led the seed round and exclusively invests in groundbreaking Israeli cybersecurity companies.

In addition, a group of more than 50 prominent CISOs has again invested their pooled funds and technical expertise in Orca Security’s success through their recently formed SVCI (Silicon Valley CISO Investments) angel syndicate.

“We are very impressed with the depth, ease of deployment, and effectiveness of Orca Security’s technology, and believe in its potential to solve the growing problem in cloud security,” said Matthew Jacobson, General Partner at ICONIQ Growth. “We have been fortunate to partner with many high growth, high impact, emerging market leaders with an unmatched approach to solving customer needs and we have full confidence in Orca Security’s long-term opportunity as an important technology leader.”

Expanding Global Partner Ecosystem

Orca Security is also expanding its global partner network and will announce an official partner program in the coming months. The company is especially focused on building partnerships in the markets where it is rapidly gaining customer traction including the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan. Any potentially interested partners are encouraged to reach out for more information: partners@orca.security

“The market response to Orca has been second to none. Collecting numerous industry awards, Orca has seen impressive adoption by both enterprise and SMB security teams, increasing Orca’s revenue tenfold from its Series A,” said Oren Yunger, investor, GGV Capital. “This buzz is well deserved as Orca provides immense value where agents and network scanners fail to. It not only depicts the vulnerabilities, but also outlines the full context of the business and cloud environment. GGV Capital is thrilled to double down on Orca in its Series B and support its stratospheric growth.”

“Orca’s agentless cloud security solution is lightyears ahead of its time,” said Yoav Leitersdorf, Managing Partner at YL Ventures. “But even our highest expectations didn’t account for how quickly Orca’s SideScanning technology transformed its sector. Thanks to a team of highly respected technologists and a powerful new approach to cloud security, Orca’s attracted the industry’s top talent, closed high-profile customers and secured a total of $82 million in funding in just under two years.”