Cyera Uses LLMs for Data Security

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According to a recent research report, the global data-centric security market was pegged at $4.2 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow 24% annually to $12.3 billion by 2027. San Mateo-based Cyera, is a rapidly growing player in the market that recently closed a $300 million funding round that sent it into the Unicorn club.

Cyera’s Offerings

Cyera was founded in 2021 by Tamar Bar-Ilan and Yotam Segev who served together in the Israel Defense Force (IDF)’s Unit where they founded, built, and ran the cloud security division. They set up Cyera because they wanted to develop an agentless, cloud-native platform that could be deployed in minutes and used native APIs to continuously discover, classify, and secure sensitive data.

Cyera’s AI-enhanced tools create accurate pictures of where and how data is being used in organizations’ networks. Unlike traditional data security platforms that analyze data through plain pattern recognition or threat signature detection, Cyera actively identifies and draws insights from the customer’s data environment. It analyzes this information to identify how best to secure the organization’s data. This exercise becomes more relevant as more and more companies are looking to deploy AI initiatives that are highly dependent on their data. Cyera’s platform automates remediation workflows that help minimize the attack surface and improve resilience for the organization.

Cyera’s platform uses large language models (LLMs) to deliver its offering. Its unified policy engine actively detects misconfigurations, suggests controls, and generates new security policies to ensure compliance and govern access to sensitive data. The tool is well integrated with Azure OpenAI that builds on Cyera’s use of LLMs to automatically differentiate between roles, understand the data’s origin and purpose, and learn how best to use the data.

The increasing use of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT is also increasing enterprise-wide security risks. To address this, Cyera introduced SafeType, a browser extension that anonymizes sensitive data entered into ChatGPT. SafeType detects sensitive information and alerts the user on why sharing such information is not encouraged. It offers the ability to anonymize the data or delete it from the session. The SafeType extension is available for the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers.

Cyera’s Financials

Cyera remains privately held and does not disclose its financials. Analysts estimate that it is generating revenues of $20-$30 million annually. Cyera expects revenues to grow 500% this year and is targeting annual revenues of $100 million within a few quarters.

It has raised $460 million in funding so far from investors including Coatue, AT&T, Spark Capital, Georgian, RedPoint, Accel, Sequoia, and Cyberstarts. Its latest round was held in April this year when it raised $300 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion. The company had raised $100 million last year at a valuation of $500 million.

Data security is a very crowded space. Besides Cyera, there are several other players like BigID, Wiz, and Varonis that offer similar products. Earlier this year, BigID had also raised $60 million at a valuation of over $1 billion. BigID’s revenues are estimated at $100 million.

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