"Because we were able to prove that our customers can get even better security using our technology over alternative methods, it wasn't hard to raise capital."
Avi Shua, CEO of Orca Security
Orca Security, the Cloud Security start-up founded in 2019 by eight former Check Point cybersecurity executives and architects, is announcing today a successful Series A round of $20 Million led by GGV Capital with participation by YL Ventures who invested in their seed round. This successful Series A is a key milestone in Orca’s incredible journey so far and will fuel their ambition to become the go-to cloud security solution helping more global organizations manage their cloud security more effectively via comprehensive cloud visibility whilst also reducing deployment times and costs.
This successful Series A is of great significance in respect to the wider tech start-up and funding world. Firstly, Orca raised Seed Capital of $6.5m less than 12 months ago and has since experienced rapid and impressive growth – they have doubled their workforce since June 2019 and plan to double again by the end of the year.Secondly, the company has gained industry support from Silicon Valley CISOs Investors (SVCI) where notable security industry leaders have invested their own funds. Thirdly, even during economic boom times, raising capital is both challenging and highly competitive and so to do so in today’s environment is a clear indicator of both Orca’s success so far and the future that SVCI is predicting for them as major players in the cloud security industry.
When asked about how easy they found the funding round experience, Avi Shua, Orca Security’s CEO, told us:
“Funding wasn’t an issue. We are building something dramatically different and are providing a unique proposition to customers that reduce their costs. Because we were able to prove that our customers can get even better security using our technology over alternative methods, it wasn’t hard to raise capital.”
“Even during our seed funding round, our investors connected us to customers who told us ‘if what Orca are doing is possible, it’s a game-changer”.
We are all used to hearing about the Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure but where does Orca Security fit into all of this and why does SVCI consider their technology to be game-changing?
Many organizations have moved their whole IT infrastructure and Data over to the cloud, but this does not mean that they are no longer vulnerable to security breaches. Cloud infrastructures are large, highly complex and ever-changing and so maintaining visibility of the exposure to vulnerabilities is a difficult, expensive and time-consuming task requiring very highly skilled people.
“We are working with customers who have full time cloud security teams but were still failing. They have thousands of workloads, installs and upgrades to do - it simply didn’t work” Avi informed us.
“Unfortunately, we saw that there were too many Cloud Security companies that had invested too much time on marketing and less on thinking about the best way to do security. You see so many companies talk about their ‘cloud native solutions’ when, in fact, they are simply the same product from 5 years ago.”
Orca Security believe that the traditional ways of managing cloud security are broken and have set out to revolutionize the way organizations secure their cloud infrastructures. But how exactly are they are achieving this? The answer is SideScanning™ - the cloud security technology which they invented. SideScanning™ enables comprehensive visibility into an entire cloud infrastructure and assets at a fraction of the time and cost of alternative approaches. It can identify vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, weak passwords, and high-risk data in minutes – something that would traditionally take weeks or months of installing agents on every cloud asset. e. It is Orca’s unique ability to solve these critical issues which affect all organizations that use the cloud that has resulted in their rapid rise to prominence.
“We treat cloud security differently. Organizations are breached because of neglected workloads and because of the organizational friction involved in the deployment of security tools”
“The Cloud is here to stay so let’s find the best way to solve the problem and do it for the way that fits the cloud without any prejudgment on the way it was done before. In doing so, we can take it in a dramatically better direction, and this is exactly what we’re been doing at Orca Security.” explains Avi.
Whilst current US unemployment figures are estimated to be 30m and many industries are experiencing slow down, shut down or stagnation, Orca Security is continuing their journey of rapid growth and plan to double their workforce once again over the next 12 months. We asked Avi about the reason behind Orca’s success so far and his future ambitions for Orca:
“You can’t win a market if your solution is only a bit better. There are so many reasons for customers to use their existing solutions. Even if you do something that is 20% better nobody is going to buy it, it would be very hard to cause a switch in the market just for 20% better. But if you can do something that is an order of magnitude better, then you can cause change”.
“Our aim is to be the go-to solution that everyone who uses the cloud, whether that’s AWS, GCP or Azure, can use Orca as the tool that’s central to managing their Cloud Security. So far, more than 80% of the organizations who tried our product became our customers.”
Once in a while a technology start-up comes along where you get a sense that something important is happening. When we think of the high-profile data breaches in recent times and the damage it can do to an organization’s reputation, we begin to see why managing cloud security is something that organizations simply cannot afford to get wrong. But, as individuals, remember that many organizations hold our personal and transactional data and so how successful these organizations are at managing cloud security is something that can have a huge impact on all of us and it is companies such as Orca that we need to be successful as they are the future in helping to protect us.
