Vega raises $120M Collection B to rethink how enterprises detect cyber threats – Cyber Tech

Fashionable enterprises generate monumental quantities of safety information, however legacy instruments like Splunk nonetheless require firms to retailer all of it in a single place earlier than they’ll detect threats — a gradual and dear course of that’s more and more breaking down in cloud environments the place volumes are exploding and information lives in every single place. 

AI cybersecurity startup Vega Safety desires to flip that method by operating safety the place the info already lives, implementing in cloud providers, information lakes, and present storage programs. And the two-year-old agency simply raised a $120 million Collection B spherical to scale that imaginative and prescient, TechCrunch has solely realized.

Led by Accel with participation from Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and CRV, the brand new spherical almost doubles Vega’s valuation to $700 million, and brings its whole funding to $185 million, cash the startup will use to additional develop its AI-native safety operations suite, beef up its go-to-market crew, and increase globally.

Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, advised TechCrunch that the present working mannequin of the SIEM (safety data and occasion administration) — the dominant expertise on this area for the final 20 years — will not be solely “loopy costly,” however can also be more and more inflicting AI-native safety operations to fail. In complicated cloud environments, he says, the present mannequin usually will increase publicity to menace actors.  

“Vega has outlined a brand new working mannequin that permits organizations to leverage the complete potential of their enterprise information to attain incident response readiness, with out all of the complexity, the fee, the drama,” Sandler advised TechCrunch. “We need to merely allow them to succeed in AI-native detection response functionality anyplace the info is, at scale.”

Like so many cybersecurity founders, Sandler did his time within the Israeli army’s cybersecurity unit earlier than being one of many founding staff behind Granulate, which Intel acquired for $650 million in 2022. After a 12 months at Intel, Sandler determined to “do it huge time within the cybersecurity world.”

That pedigree is partly what attracted the eye of Andrei Brasoveanu, a companion at Accel. Nevertheless it was additionally Vega’s bold method to safety administration in a market that’s already dominated by one participant: Splunk.

Brasoveanu advised TechCrunch that legacy SIEM firms like Splunk, which Cisco acquired in 2024 for $28 billion, have been criticized in recent times as a result of their options are tough to scale. They fail at processing the insane rise of information volumes pushed by AI. 

“Splunk and each contender since has at all times centralized the info, however by doing that you simply primarily maintain the shopper hostage,” Brasoveanu stated. 

Nevertheless, typically it’s simpler to hate the established order than do the work of constructing a change to a greater various, a quandary any startup trying to breach enterprise budgets understands. That’s why Sandler says Vega’s “North Star” was to not solely construct an answer that’s less expensive and higher at menace detection, however “to make it no drama, so simple as potential for the largest, most complicated enterprises on the planet to undertake it inside minutes.”

Vega’s method appears to be working. The 100-person startup has already signed multimillion-dollar contracts with banks, healthcare firms, and Fortune 500 corporations, together with cloud-heavy firms like Instacart.

“The one purpose they might try this with a two-year-old startup is as a result of the issue is so painful and different options available on the market require an unrealistic expectation that the enterprise change the best way they function or do two years of information migrations,” Sandler stated. “Vega allows them to simply plug and play and obtain rapid detection response worth.”