Anthropic alarmed both governments and the business world in April when it released Mythos, a more powerful version of the company’s Claude artificial intelligence model. The updated system was so adept at unearthing cybersecurity vulnerabilities, Anthropic said, that it feared releasing the system too widely.
For Yotam Segev, the chief executive and co-founder of the cybersecurity start-up Cyera, which is focused on protecting companies’ data from A.I.-based threats, it felt as if the rest of the world was waking up to an alarm he’s been sounding for the past few years. “I view Mythos as the first chapter in a book that might be called ‘How A.I. Transformed Cybersecurity,’” he said. (Yesterday, Anthropic released a “safer” version of Mythos.)
Today, Cyera announced it had raised $600 million at a $12 billion valuation, bringing the company’s funding total to $2.3 billion. The new round was led by Evolution Equity Partners, with participation from Cyberstarts and Temasek. Just six months ago, Cyera closed a $400 million round at a $9 billion valuation.
Cyera’s rapid growth is an example of how cybersecurity has shifted from a focus on human-based threats to A.I.-based ones. As companies and hackers alike adopt so-called A.I. agents, which can execute tasks on their own, cybersecurity solutions must also become agentic. “Only machines will be able to protect machines,” Mr. Segev said.
Another major example of this shift came earlier this year when Google acquired the A.I.-focused cybersecurity start-up Wiz for a staggering $32 billion.
A primary use case of Cyera, Mr. Segev said, is identifying a company’s “crown jewel” data, such as customer information, and making sure it is safely stored. If an employee or an A.I. agent shares that data, Cyera’s system is meant to autonomously leap into action, by restricting access to the data or deleting it.
Mr. Segev and his two co-founders met in the Israeli Defense Forces’s Talpiot program for academically promising recruits. After leaving the army, they founded Cyera (pronounced “Sierra”) out of Tel Aviv in 2021 with a focus on data security.
In 2022 they shifted their headquarters to New York City. That same year, ChatGPT was released and “data security went from being very important to existential,” said Lior Simon, a general partner at the Israeli-based venture capital firm Cyberstarts, which was the first venture capital firm to invest in Cyera.
In the past few years demand for A.I.-focused cybersecurity start-ups has grown quickly. Last year, venture capitalists invested $16.5 billion in cybersecurity start-ups, up 27 percent year-over-year, according to PitchBook. Of those, more than 50 percent of the companies were A.I.-native.
Cyera declined to share its revenue numbers, but said its annual revenue rate has more than tripled for the last three years in a row. The company’s customers include AT&T, Bose, Chipotle and Paramount. According to Cyera, each of its customers pay north of $1 million a year for its services.
The company intends to use its new $600 million in funding to accelerate its A.I.-based capabilities. That includes through internal research and development as well as possible acquisitions. Already this year, the company has been on a spending spree, acquiring the A.I. cybersecurity start-ups Ryft and Genie Security.
Cyera has roughly 1,500 employees, about 1,000 of whom were added in the last 18 months. Mr. Segev said he didn’t plan to continue hiring at that breakneck rate, adding that A.I. tools had “completely revolutionized” the way the company worked and decreased the need to grow head count so rapidly.
The cybersecurity landscape is fiercely competitive. Other A.I.-native upstarts, including Sentra and Symmetry Systems (which was just acquired by Zscaler), are pitching themselves as most capable of autonomously managing data risks introduced by A.I.
At the same time, large legacy firms like Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike are investing heavily in their A.I. capabilities. And frontier labs, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have shown that their increasingly sophisticated models have the ability to upend the cybersecurity marketplace.
For his part, Mr. Segev said he was not looking for Cyera to get acquired. And he’s not itching to go public, either. “We want the I.P.O. route to be open,” Mr. Segev said. “I don’t think it’s a target.”
