Modern businesses generate massive amounts of security data, but legacy tools like Splunk still require companies to store it all in one place before they can detect threats—a slow and expensive process that increasingly breaks down in cloud environments where volumes explode and data lives everywhere.
AI cybersecurity startup Vega Security wants to upend this approach by implementing security where data already lives, by applying it to cloud services, data lakes and existing storage systems. And the two-year-old company just raised a $120 million Series B round to scale that vision, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.
Led by Accel with participation from Cyberstarts, Redpoint and CRV, the new round nearly doubles Vega’s valuation to $700 million and brings its total funding to $185 million, money the startup will use to further develop its suite of native AI security features, strengthen its market team and expand globally.
Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch that the current operating model of SIEM (security information and event management) — the dominant technology in this field for the past two decades — is not only “crazy expensive,” but also increasingly causes native AI security functions to fail. In complex cloud environments, he says, the current model often increases exposure to threat actors.
“Vega has defined a new operating model that allows organizations to fully leverage the potential of their enterprise data to achieve incident readiness, without all the complexity, cost and drama,” Sandler told TechCrunch. “We just want to enable them to get to the ability to respond to native AI detection wherever the data is, at scale.”
Like many cybersecurity founders, Sandler spent time in the Israeli military’s cybersecurity unit before becoming one of the founding employees behind Granulate, which Intel acquired for $650 million in 2022. After a year at Intel, Sandler decided to “make it big in the cybersecurity world.”
That pedigree is partly what caught the attention of Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner at Accel. But it was also Vega’s ambitious approach to managing security in a market already dominated by one player: Splunk.
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Brasoveanu told TechCrunch that legacy SIEM companies like Splunk, which Cisco acquired in 2024 for $28 billion, have been criticized in recent years because their solutions are difficult to scale. They fail to process the insane increase in data volume caused by artificial intelligence.
“Splunk and every candidate since has always aggregated the data, but by doing that you’re essentially holding the customer hostage,” Brasoveanu said.
However, sometimes it’s easier to hate the status quo than to make the transition to a better alternative, a dilemma that any startup trying to break enterprise budgets understands. That’s why Sandler says Vega’s “North Star” was not only to create a solution that’s more cost-effective and better at detecting threats, but “to make it as simple as possible for the world’s largest, most complex enterprises to adopt in minutes.”
Vega’s approach seems to be working. The 100-person startup has already signed multimillion-dollar contracts with banks, healthcare companies and Fortune 500 companies, including cloud heavyweights like Instacart.
“The only reason they would do that with a two-year-old startup is because the problem is so painful and other solutions in the market require an unrealistic expectation that the business will change the way it operates or do two years of data migration,” Sandler said. “Vega enables them to plug and play and achieve instant detection response value.”
