Less than five years ago, Yotam Segev cofounded Cyera to solve the practical, enterprise-scale problem of data security. Then, the world changed: as the AI boom materialized, data became the essential fuel for corporations to make their AI dreams a reality.
That’s put Cyera in an important position within organizations in need of new frameworks for data security and data management—defending a company’s information from a multitude of new threats, including agentic attacks, while enabling internal data to power new AI applications.
“Our business had legs before AI,” said Segev. “But with AI, it’s got wings.”
The wings are lifting the valuation of Segev’s startup too. In June, Cyera was valued at $6 billionin its seventh funding round. Now, just six months later, Cyera is worth $9 billion. Cyera raised $400 million in its recently closed Series F funding, the company exclusively confirmed to Fortune. Blackstone Growth led the round, with participation from existing investors including Accel, Coatue, Cyberstarts, Georgian, Greenoaks, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark.
Cyera, which has grown to 1,100 employees, has its roots in Israel, and cofounder and CTO Tamar Bar-Ilan served in Israel’s famed Unit 8200. Cyera’s customers include AT&T, Peloton, Nordstrom, and Chipotle, though the company declined to disclose its current financial results (In June, it said its annual recurring revenue had surpassed $100 million).
The funding is the latest sign of investors’ growing recognition of the importance of cybersecurity in the AI age, creating a flurry of deals and a new crop of cybersecurity mega-unicorns. The most famous is Wiz, which Alphabet agreed to acquire for a staggering $32 billion. Some of the other largest deals in recent memory are cyber security, including Palo Alto Network’s astonishing $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk in 2025.
The cybersecurity landscape right now is rife with opportunity and anxiety, particularly for giant companies that are trying to find their way in a world with a rapidly expanding threat landscape that far surpasses just humans.
“We’re chasing agentic attackers, and these attackers are going to be much more honed, much more put together, and much more consistent and reliable in their actions and delivery at millisecond speed,” Segev says.
Fortune 1000 CEOs and executives are well-aware that a catastrophic breach could and likely would cost them their jobs, he says. But business leaders don’t have the luxury of sitting on the AI sidelines on account of the risks. In order to apply AI to their often massive enterprises, big businesses need to lock in their data infrastructure.
“If they don’t have the data security done right, they just have no ability to say ‘Yes’ to AI in the way they want to,” Segev says.
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