Israeli-founded cyber unicorn Cyera said to raise $400m, soaring to $9 billion valuation

Israeli-founded Cyera, a developer of an AI-powered data security platform, is raising $400 million in a funding round led by New York-based alternative asset manager Blackstone that values the company at $9 billion, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news. The investment comes just six months after Cyera secured $540 million in a funding round in June that doubled its valuation to $6 billion. It also raised $300 million in November 2024, at a $3 billion valuation.

Four years after it was founded, the startup is set to be backed by about $1.7 billion in funding from global and local investors, including Accel, Coatue, Cyberstarts, Georgian, Lightspeed and Sequoia. Cyera and Blackstone declined to comment when contacted by The Times of Israel.

Cyera was founded in 2021 by Yotam Segev, CEO, and Tamar Bar-Ilan, CTO, who met during their Israeli army service, during which they both built and ran the cloud security division for the Israel Defense Force’s elite intelligence Unit 8200.

Exposed to the challenges of securing data in the cloud, Segev and Bar-Ilan decided after their military service to develop and build a unified data security platform to provide businesses and organizations with a complete view of where their data “lives, how it’s used, and how to keep it safe.”

The startup says the platform helps businesses eliminate blind spots, cut threat alert noise and protect sensitive information scattered across their cloud environments; Software as a Service, or SaaS, programs; databases; and applications, as they increasingly adopt AI tools.

The fast adoption of AI applications by organizations and businesses has accelerated the need to secure their most sensitive data. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, with bad actors leveraging AI to outsmart traditional defenses and exploit blind spots in data and cloud systems of businesses and corporations.

The vote of confidence comes as Israel’s cyber industry again defied the odds in 2025 by attracting $4.4 billion in investments, up from $4 billion a year earlier, even though the country was contending with a two-year multifront war with the Hamas terror group in Gaza and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, as well as Iran and other Iranian proxies.

Since the end of 2023, a flurry of Israeli-founded cybersecurity startups have been acquired by global tech companies as well as local players as they look to meet the fast-growing security needs of businesses and government for cybersecurity solutions. Most prominently, Google earlier this year acquired cybersecurity unicorn Wiz for a staggering $32 billion, the largest deal involving an Israeli-founded company.