According to Gartner, 70% of all enterprise workloads will be deployed in cloud infrastructure and platform services by 2023, up from 40% in 2020. Under this paradigm shift, agent-based solutions are ill-suited to meet the increased complexity and ephemeral nature of the cloud. Exhausted, enterprise security teams are turning to new platforms.
Addressing this issue is the Israeli security company offering agent-less platform for protecting cloud-based assets, Orca Security. Its Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) aims to simplify the detection and prioritisation of security issues in minutes, not months.
The platform has secured a $550 million extension to the Series C funding round it raised seven months ago. Led by Temasek, an investment company headquartered in Singapore, the round has boosted Orca’s valuation 50 percent in just seven months to $1.8 Billion.
The startup’s C round also includes substantial participation from venture capital firms CapitalG (Alphabet’s independent growth fund), Redpoint Ventures, GGV, ICONIQ Capital, Lone Pine Capital, Stripes, Adams Street Partners, Willoughby Capital, and Harmony Partners.
The UK expansion
The additional funding will permit Orca to expand its footprint and customer base in the UK and across the EMEA region. The company recently launched versions of its website in German and French to better support its partners, prospects, and customers. In addition, the company is opening a physical office in London, where it will have an expanded sales presence, and a new R&D centre, its first outside of Tel Aviv. Orca Security plans to have over two dozen employees working in London by the end of the year.
Addressing cyber gimmicks
Pent-up demand from companies fed up with cyber gimmicks, subpar solutions that require the tedious deployment of agents on every asset, and disparate tools marketed as one solution, has helped fuel Orca Security’s 800 percent year-over-year growth.
“Customers are fed up with agent-based tools that claim run-time protection but de facto are little more than a gimmick, typically reach only a fraction of the environment, and don’t provide the context security teams desperately need to prioritise critical alerts,” said Avi Shua, CEO and co-founder, Orca Security. “Our growth is exploding because Orca Security simply works. We provide fast agentless deployment, 100 percent coverage of all cloud assets, and automatic prioritization of the alerts that demand quick action.”
Prioritise critical alerts
Orca Security’s patent-pending SideScanning technology collects data directly from cloud provider APIs and the workload’s runtime block storage out-of-band. This means that after a quick and easy one-time deployment, Orca Security surfaces critical attack vectors, composed of the most serious risks such as vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, weak and leaked passwords, lateral movement risk, misplaced PII, and more.
It accomplishes this while guaranteeing 100 percent security coverage for all cloud assets including virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, cloud storage buckets, VPCs, cryptographic keys, security groups, and much more. This technical innovation helped earn the company recognition as a 2021 Gartner Cool Vendor.
Orca Security will leverage Temasek’s investment portfolio and global network to deepen its penetration into the APAC region and beyond, and into key industries such as telecom, financial services, transportation, consumer goods, and more. Orca Security plans to have over a dozen employees in the APAC region by the end of 2021.
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