A US cybersecurity unicorn is targeting growth in the UK after being tempted across the Atlantic by the nation’s FinTech reputation.
Orca Security, headquartered in Los Angeles, has gone from seed funding to unicorn in two years after announcing a £150 million Series C funding round, led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, and Redpoint Ventures.
The company has raised nearly $300m in combined funds at a $1.2 billion valuation since its founding two years ago.
“It’s an exciting time for Orca in the UK,” Tim Thorpe, Area Sales Manager in the UK, tells BusinessCloud.
“FinTech is one of our hottest verticals and the UK has one of the world’s largest concentrations of FinTechs, so it makes sense for us to be where the action is.
“As the first on the ground, we’ll be building out our footprint here over the next year to help support our partners. We’re already looking to expand our team in the UK.”
In 2020, Orca Security achieved more than 1,000 percent year-over-year growth and signed huge organisations including Robinhood, Databricks and Unity.
“By creating a security solution that actually works, we are solving a fundamental problem that has been broken since the inception of cloud security,” said Avi Shua, CEO and co-founder.
“In the face of increasing threats and rapidly expanding cloud estates, organisations can’t be burdened with installing and maintaining agents and sidecars.
“We enable our customers to instantly protect their cloud environments, eliminate attack paths, fuel digital transformation, and meet compliance mandates.”
Morey Haber, CTO and CISO at BeyondTrust, has worked with vulnerability assessment solutions for over 20 years, even writing a book on how to build a vulnerability management strategy.
“I’ve never seen anything like the Orca Security platform before,” he said. “Within a couple of months I had it fully rolled out, protecting our more than 4,000 cloud customers.
“This product is a gem and must-have solution for businesses operating in the cloud.”
Gene Frantz, general partner at CapitalG, added: “Orca Security represents a revolutionary step forward in optimising cloud environments.
“Their touchless SideScanning technology is best-in-class, as confirmed by our extensive interviews with their ecstatic customers and by the senior Google security leaders who we invited to evaluate it.
“We believe that Avi and team not only have a compelling vision but also the ability to execute it. We’re thrilled to join Orca on their journey to reinvent cloud security.”
Orca said the funding will allow it to further disrupt the cloud security industry with agentless, workload-deep, context-aware security and compliance for Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure.
By the end of 2021, it plans to have nearly tripled its R&D and sales teams since its Series A round in May 2020.
The company also aims to expand its sales offices in Europe, recently opened a new office in Austria, and has plans to open an office in Australia to better serve APAC markets.