Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Orca Security Ltd. announced today it has raised $55 million in new funding to expand its cloud security and compliance capabilities, hire more people open new sales offices in the U.K. and Australia.

The Series B round was led by ICONIQ Growth and included previous investors GGV Capital, YL Ventures and Silicon Valley CISO Investments.

Founded in 2019 by former Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. Chief Technologist Avi Shua and Gil Geron, former director for cybersecurity gateway and cloud products (pictured), Orca Security offers a technology it calls SideScanning that’s designed to deliver comprehensive and seamless visibility into the security posture of an organization’s complete cloud footprint.

The technology, offered as a managed service that can be installed in minutes, provides full-stack visibility into an organization’s cloud infrastructure by reading the runtime block storage of a virtualized workload out of band and cross-referencing the image with comparative information pulled from each cloud vendor’s application program interfaces.

It does so by treating each customer’s cloud estate as an interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on the underlying security issue combined with environmental context, including its accessibility and potential damage to the business. That context helps reduce thousands of security alerts to the critical few that matter, along with their precise path to remediation, the company says.

SideScanning includes touchless, context-aware security and compliance for Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud Platform. The technology can detect vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, lateral movement risk, weak and leaked passwords, secret keys, unsecured personally identifiable information and more.

“Cloud security is fundamentally broken,” co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Shua said in a statement.. “Practitioners are forced to waste their time installing and maintaining security agents instead of managing actual security risks. Even after spending years plumbing agents in their environment, coverage is usually limited to less than fifty percent.

Worse, he added, agent-based solutions lack context. “They can’t see beyond individual issues residing on individual assets, which leads to a never-ending barrage of meaningless security alerts,” he said. “The fact is, competing solutions view cloud resources as simple lists whereas bad actors see a graph with a clear path of attack. Orca Security changes that paradigm by visualizing cloud resources through the lens of an attacker.”

Including the new funding, Orca Security has raised $82 million to date. Previous rounds included $6.5 million in June 2019 and $20 million in May.

Photo: Orca Security