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\u2019s increasingly breaking down in cloud environments where volumes are exploding and data lives everywhere.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n
AI cybersecurity startup Vega Security<\/a> wants to flip that approach by running security where the data already lives, implementing in cloud services, data lakes, and existing storage systems. And the two-year-old firm just raised a $120 million Series B round to scale that vision, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.<\/p>\n\n Led by Accel with participation from Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and CRV, the new round nearly doubles Vega\u2019s valuation to $700 million, and brings its total funding to $185 million, money the startup will use to further develop its AI-native security operations suite, beef up its go-to-market team, and expand globally.<\/p>\n\n Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch that the current operating model of the SIEM (security information and event management) \u2014 the dominant technology in this domain for the last two decades \u2014 is not only \u201ccrazy expensive,\u201d but is also increasingly causing AI-native security operations to fail. In complex cloud environments, he says, the current model often increases exposure to threat actors. <\/p>\n\n \u201cVega 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,\u201d Sandler told TechCrunch. \u201cWe want to simply enable them to reach AI-native detection response capability anywhere the data is, at scale.\u201d<\/p>\n\n Like so many cybersecurity founders, Sandler did his time in the Israeli military’s cybersecurity unit before being one of the founding employees behind Granulate, which Intel acquired for $650 million<\/a> in 2022. After a year at Intel, Sandler decided to “do it big time in the cybersecurity world.”<\/p>\n\n That pedigree is partly what attracted the attention of Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner at Accel. But it was also Vega’s ambitious approach to security management in a market that is already dominated by one player: Splunk.<\/p>\n