Israel’s cyber sector breaks another record

The first three months of 2021 saw Israel’s cybersecurity market break another record by raising $1.5 billion in funding.

While other economic sectors in Israel have floundered, the cybersecurity industry has continued to skyrocket, with one record-breaking period following another.

In record-setting 2019, companies raised $1.8 billion. Then, in 2020, another peak was reached as firms raised $2.9 billion, almost 70% more than the previous year and after the first quarter of this year, more than half last year’s total has already been raised.

Several large deals account for the eye-popping $1.5 billion that was raised in the first quarter. The last in the series, announced on March 23, was the $210 million investment in Orca Security, a firm that specializes in cloud security.

“We’re a startup company that supplies security services to companies that use the cloud,” said Gil Geron, co-founder and chief product officer of Orca Security.

Geron explained that his company’s product replaced previous tools that were very time consuming and ineffective.

“At Orca, we invented a method that allows you to be fully protected in less than a minute,” he said.

As companies migrate their data to the cloud – a process encouraged by the pandemic and employees working from home – the need for security solutions is growing.

The company, which was founded in 2019, already has dozens of clients worldwide, and the latest investment put its value at $1.2 billion.

Earlier in March, Snyk, another Israeli security firm, announced that it had raised $300 million at a company valuation of $4.7 billion. Aqua Security, another company, raised $135 million, with a valuation of more than $1 billion.