Cyera

Based in New York, New York, Cyera is an AI-native data security platform that helps organizations discover, classify, and protect sensitive information across hybrid cloud, SaaS, and on-premises environments. The company utilizes Data Security Posture Management combined with machine learning capabilities to automate data governance, identify critical security gaps, and manage complex regulatory compliance frameworks like GDPR and HIPAA at scale. Operating with a global workforce of 1,200 employees across six offices, the enterprise software provider has remediated 127 trillion records and protected 530 million identities, successfully crossing $1 million in annual recurring revenue during 2023. To support its ongoing expansion, the venture-backed firm has raised over $1.7 billion in total equity financing from prominent institutional investors including Accel, Blackstone, Coatue, Lightspeed, and Sequoia. Cyera was founded in 2021 by Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilian.

# Cyera: The AI-Native Data Security Platform Redefining Cloud Data Protection

Cyera is an AI-native data security company that provides organizations with complete visibility and control over their sensitive data across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.[1][4] Founded in 2021 by Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilan, the company addresses a critical gap in enterprise security: the inability to quickly discover, classify, and protect data at scale in increasingly complex cloud infrastructures.[1] Rather than treating AI as an add-on feature, Cyera has built AI into the core of its architecture, enabling organizations to discover and classify petabytes of data with 95%+ precision in minutes rather than weeks.[4][7] The company serves enterprises across industries seeking to reduce their attack surface, maintain compliance with evolving regulations, and enable secure data access without sacrificing innovation velocity. Backed by leading investors including Sequoia, Accel, and Cyberstarts, Cyera has positioned itself as the fastest-growing data security company addressing the Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) market.[3]

Origin Story

Yotam Segev and Tamar Bar-Ilan founded Cyera in 2021 in direct response to the challenges organizations faced in securing data within cloud environments.[1] The founders recognized a fundamental problem: business stakeholders needed secure access to sensitive data, yet traditional security approaches couldn't provide the visibility required to manage this at scale. This insight emerged from observing how enterprises were rapidly migrating to cloud platforms without adequate tools to understand where their sensitive data lived, who could access it, and what risks it faced.

The company's early positioning focused on solving the data visibility problem—helping organizations discover and classify their data assets without deploying agents across their infrastructure, which would create performance overhead and deployment friction. This agentless approach became a core differentiator from day one, enabling rapid deployment and instant data discovery that traditional security tools couldn't match.

Core Differentiators

AI-Native Architecture

Unlike competitors that bolt AI onto existing security frameworks, Cyera has built artificial intelligence into its foundational architecture.[4] This enables the platform to deliver unprecedented speed and precision in data classification, achieving 95%+ accuracy compared to traditional pattern-matching approaches.[7] The AI-native design also allows the platform to continuously improve its understanding of data types and risks as it processes more information across customer environments.

Agentless Deployment with Instant Visibility

Cyera's agentless scanning approach eliminates the performance impact and deployment complexity that plague traditional data security tools.[5][6] Organizations can map all cloud datastores, classify data within them, and identify associated risks within minutes rather than weeks. This speed-to-value is critical in environments where data landscapes change constantly and security teams operate under resource constraints.

Unified Platform Consolidation

Rather than forcing enterprises to stitch together multiple point solutions, Cyera is building a comprehensive platform that consolidates Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Identity Access management, Data Risk Assessment, and Data Breach Readiness capabilities.[1][6] This unified approach simplifies security operations and ensures consistent policies across the entire data security program. The recent acquisition of Trail Security expanded Cyera's DLP capabilities, enabling real-time protection against data loss in motion.

Contextual Intelligence for Remediation

Cyera doesn't simply flag risks—it provides the full context needed for action, including data ownership, access logs, administrating users, and prioritized remediation guidance.[5] This transforms data security from a compliance checkbox into an operational capability that security teams can actually execute against.

Scale and Precision

The platform handles petabytes of rapidly growing enterprise data while maintaining classification accuracy that exceeds what human analysts or traditional ML approaches can achieve.[4][6] This combination of scale and precision is essential for large enterprises managing complex, distributed data environments.

Role in the Broader Tech Landscape

Cyera operates at the intersection of several powerful technology trends that are reshaping enterprise security priorities. The explosive growth of cloud adoption, combined with the acceleration of AI deployment, has created an urgent need for data-centric security approaches. Traditional perimeter-based security models are obsolete in cloud-native environments where data is distributed across multiple SaaS applications, databases, and storage systems.

The regulatory environment is also driving demand for Cyera's solutions. Privacy regulations like CCPA, GDPR, and emerging AI governance frameworks require organizations to maintain detailed inventories of sensitive data and demonstrate control over access and usage.[1] Cyera's compliance and privacy management capabilities directly address these requirements, helping enterprises streamline their compliance efforts and reduce the risk of regulatory violations.

The rise of AI-driven threats represents another critical market force. As attackers increasingly leverage AI to identify and exploit data vulnerabilities at scale, traditional security approaches that rely on manual processes or slower automation cannot keep pace.[7] Cyera's AI-native platform is purpose-built to match the speed and sophistication of modern threats, providing the real-time clarity and control that enterprises need.

Within the broader cybersecurity ecosystem, Cyera is helping shift the industry toward data-centric security models. Rather than focusing solely on network perimeter defense or endpoint protection, enterprises are recognizing that data itself must be the center of gravity for security strategy. Cyera's platform enables this shift by making data visibility and governance operationally feasible at enterprise scale. The company's 40+ integrations with existing security tools—including SIEM, CNAPP, and DLP solutions—position it as a central hub within security operations, influencing how enterprises architect their entire security programs.[6]

Quick Take & Future Outlook

Cyera is well-positioned to capture significant market share in the rapidly expanding DSPM category, which is being driven by regulatory pressures, rising data privacy concerns, and the acceleration of cloud and AI adoption.[2] The company's AI-native architecture, agentless deployment model, and focus on unified platform consolidation address the core pain points that enterprises face when trying to secure data at scale.

The company's stated ambition to become "the most comprehensive platform in the data security market" suggests an aggressive roadmap that will expand beyond DSPM into adjacent areas including privacy, governance, risk and compliance (GRC), and AI security.[1] This consolidation strategy mirrors successful plays in other security categories and could position Cyera as a central platform that enterprises standardize on for their entire data security program.

Key trends that will shape Cyera's trajectory include the continued maturation of AI governance frameworks, which will create new compliance requirements around data lineage and AI model training data; the proliferation of non-human identities (service accounts, API tokens, AI agents) accessing sensitive data, which will require more sophisticated identity and access management; and the increasing sophistication of ransomware and data exfiltration attacks, which will drive demand for real-time data loss prevention capabilities.

The company's growth momentum—described as "unprecedented" by industry observers—suggests strong product-market fit and healthy customer acquisition dynamics.[7] As enterprises increasingly recognize that they cannot afford to be "blind to their data risks," Cyera's mission to provide instant data reality and eliminate guesswork from cloud data security becomes not just valuable but essential. The company's challenge will be maintaining its technical edge and execution velocity as it scales, while effectively competing against both established security vendors and emerging competitors in the DSPM space.