Less than a year after founding Cyera, Yotam Segev stood in front of a Fortune 500 security team in the Carolinas and showed them a demo. He remembers the chief information security officer's excited reaction as one of his favorite moments, he told Pulse 2.0. It was the first sign that a company built from nothing could say something a large buyer wanted to hear.
The idea started in the Israeli military. Segev attended the IDF's Talpiot leadership academy, where he met Tamar Bar-Ilan more than a decade ago, and served in Unit 8200, where he saw security teams struggle to know where their sensitive data lived. He later led teams that deployed and ran cybersecurity technology in the field.
Revenue is not disclosed in anything read here, and bigger platform vendors sell overlapping tools.
They founded Cyera in 2021 with Yonatan Itay, who ran engineering. It came out of stealth in March 2022 with a $60 million Series A. Segev has pointed to the economic climate as a hard thing for an early company creating a new category. Companies had spent a decade putting data into cloud warehouses and SaaS apps, and few could answer a basic question: where is the sensitive stuff? Cyera's software finds it, labels it and flags what is exposed.
The money came in large steps. Accel led a round in 2023. Coatue led $300 million in April 2024, and Accel and Sapphire put in another $300 million that November. In June 2025 came $540 million at a $6 billion valuation, and Blackstone led $400 million in January 2026. In June 2026 a $600 million Series G, led by Evolution Equity Partners with Cyberstarts and Temasek, priced it at $12 billion. A September extension from Goldman Sachs Alternatives was reported at $400 million, though one source says $300 million. Total funding exceeds $2.7 billion.
It also started buying: Trail Security for about $162 million in October 2024, Shape AI and Otterize in 2025, and in July 2026 Oasis Security for about $1 billion, completed in September and renamed Cyera Identity.
The skeptic's questions are fair. Revenue is not disclosed in anything read here, and bigger platform vendors sell overlapping tools. And a $1 billion acquisition is hard to digest at five years old.
The record is thin on the personal side: no childhood, no money scare. What it does show is a founder who still singles out one customer's excitement in a Carolina meeting room. A first-time founder can take that: before the valuation, someone has to lean forward.