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Source: Sergey Balakhnichev via Alamy Stock Photo
NEWS BRIEF
Nir Zuk built Palo Alto Networks from a scrappy startup to a $125 billion security giant. He is starting over again with Cylake, a cybersecurity startup that will provide cybersecurity for organizations that cannot shift to the cloud over data sovereignty concerns.
Many organizations, such as governments, defense contractors, and those in other highly regulated industries, are restricted from buying security products with features and services that depend on public cloud infrastructure because of regulatory and security requirements around their data. Cylake is building a hardware-based cybersecurity platform powered by artificial intelligence and data-driven analysis that these organizations can put in their environment. Because Cylake's system is designed to operate entirely in on-premises environments or within private cloud and does not rely on public cloud infrastructure, organizations maintain full control and sovereignty over their data.
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Cylake will "deliver AI-native security entirely within the customer's own sovereign environment, serving a market where cybersecurity innovation hasn't kept up," wrote Asheem Chandna, a partner at Greylock Partners. Cylake is backed by $45 million from Greylock. "Cylake is focused on a segment of the market where security must operate under full control to meet regulatory and operational reality."
According to Cylake, the next generation of AI-driven cybersecurity requires a holistic view of organizational infrastructure, combining data and context from multiple layers into a unified protection platform. Instead of sending operational and security data from sources such as network infrastructure, endpoints, cloud workloads, and existing security tools to cloud-based analysis tools, Cylake will pull all the data together in a single data layer to be analyzed locally using machine learning models and automated processes designed to detect anomalous patterns. Cylake's platform will identify potential security incidents, generate alerts, and help incident response teams analyze relationships between events and activity patterns.
"Cylake is for institutions where maintaining full control over data and operations is not optional," Zuk said in a statement.
The funding will be used to develop the platform and refine its AI-native architecture. Cylake plans to work with several development partners to build out its platform. Commercial availability is expected in early 2027.
Zuk founded Palo Alto Networks in 2005 and retired last August, shortly after the company completed its $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk. The other co-founders are Wilson Xu, who led the engineering team at Palo Alto Networks, and Ehud (Udi) Shamir, the co-founder of SentinelOne.
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