Vega raises $120M Series B to rethink how enterprises detect cyber threats

Source: TechCrunch

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. The two‑year‑old firm just raised a $120 million Series B round to scale that vision, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

Funding round

• Led by Accel with participation from Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and CRV.
• The round nearly doubles Vega’s valuation to $700 M and brings total funding to $185 M.
• Funds will be used to further develop Vega’s AI‑native security operations suite, expand the go‑to‑market team, and grow globally.

New operating model

Shay Sandler, co‑founder and CEO of Vega, says the current SIEM (security information and event management) model is “crazy expensive” and increasingly causes AI‑native security operations to fail. In complex cloud environments, the 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.”

Founder background

• Sandler served in the Israeli military’s cybersecurity unit.
• He was a founding employee of Granulate, which Intel acquired for $650 million in 2022.
• After a year at Intel, he decided to “do it big time in the cybersecurity world.”

Market context

Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, notes that legacy SIEM companies like Splunk, which Cisco acquired in 2024 for $28 billion, have been criticized for solutions that are difficult to scale and struggle with the surge 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.

Vega’s “North Star” is to build a solution that is more cost‑effective and better at threat detection, while being “no drama, as simple as possible for the biggest, most complex enterprises in the world to adopt within minutes.”

Customer traction

• The 100‑person startup has already signed multi‑million‑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.”