Israeli cloud cybersecurity startup Orca Security Ltd. announced today that it has raised $550 million in an extended Series C round that was originally $210 million in March.

The new funding will be used to expand into key industries and further grow the company’s business in the Asia-Pacific region. Including the new funding, Orca Security has raised $632 million to date, according to data from Crunchbase.

Singaporean company Temasek led the extended Series C round. Other investors included CapitalG, Redpoint Ventures, GGV, ICONIQ Capital, Lone Pine Capital, Stripes, Adams Street Partners, Willoughby Capital and Harmony Partners. The extended round was raised on a valuation of $1.8 billion, up from a $1.2 billion valuation in March.

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. It’s designed to deliver comprehensive and seamless visibility into the security posture of an organization’s complete cloud footprint.

Offered as a managed service, the company’s technology provides full-stack visibility into an organization’s cloud infrastructure by reading the runtime block storage of a virtualized workload out of band. The technology then cross-references the image with comparative information pulled from each cloud vendor’s application programming interfaces, treating each customer’s cloud estate as an interconnected web of assets.

Orca Security’s platform prioritizes risk based on the underlying security issue combined with environmental context, including its accessibility and potential damage to the business. The company says that it helps reduce thousands of security alerts to the critical few that matter, along with their precise path to remediation.

With the shift to remote work with the COVID-19 pandemic ongoing, Orca Security has seen extraordinarily strong growth, up 800% year-over-year, off an undisclosed base.

“Customers are fed up with agent-based tools that claim runtime protection but de facto are little more than a gimmick, typically reach only a fraction of the environment and don’t provide the context security teams desperately need to prioritize critical alerts,” Avi Shua, co-founder and chief executive of Orca Security, said in a statement. “Our growth is exploding because Orca Security simply works. We provide fast agentless deployment, 100% coverage of all cloud assets, and automatic prioritization of the alerts that demand quick action.”

As part of Temasek leading the extended funding, the two companies will work together with a focus on the Asia-Pacific region along with Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Orca Security plans to have more than a dozen employees in the APAC region by the end of 2021 and is also planning to open a physical office and research and development center in London, its first outside Tel Aviv.

Photo: Orca Security