Modern enterprises generate enormous amounts of security data, but legacy tools like Splunk still require companies to store all of it in one place before they can detect threats — a slow and costly process that’s increasingly breaking down in cloud environments where volumes are exploding and data lives everywhere.
AI cybersecurity startup Vega Security wants to flip that approach by running security where the data already lives, implementing in cloud services, data lakes, and existing storage systems. And the two-year-old firm just raised a $120 million Series B round to scale that vision, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
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 AI-native security operations suite, beef up its go-to-market team, and expand globally.
Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch that the current operating model of the SIEM (security information and event management) — the dominant technology in this domain for the last two decades — is not only “crazy expensive,” but is also increasingly causing AI-native security operations 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 enables organizations to leverage the full potential of their enterprise data to achieve incident response readiness, without all the complexity, the cost, the drama,” Sandler told TechCrunch. “We want to simply enable them to reach AI-native detection response capability anywhere the data is, at scale.”
Like so many cybersecurity founders, Sandler did his time in the Israeli military’s cybersecurity unit before being one of the founding employees behind Granulate, which Intel acquired for $650 million in 2022. After a year at Intel, Sandler decided to “do it big time in the cybersecurity world.”
That pedigree is partly what attracted the attention of Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner at Accel. But it was also Vega’s ambitious approach to security management in a market that is already dominated by one player: Splunk.
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 at processing the insane rise of data volumes driven by AI.
“Splunk and every contender since has always centralized the data, but by doing that you essentially hold the customer hostage,” Brasoveanu said.
However, sometimes it’s easier to hate the status quo than do the work of making a switch to a better alternative, a quandary any startup attempting to breach enterprise budgets understands. That’s why Sandler says Vega’s “North Star” was to not only build a solution that is more cost effective and better at threat detection, but “to make it no drama, as simple as possible for the biggest, most complex enterprises in the world to adopt it within 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 firms, including cloud-heavy companies 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 on the market require an unrealistic expectation that the enterprise change the way they operate or do two years of data migrations,” Sandler said. “Vega enables them to just plug and play and achieve immediate detection response value.”