Cylake has raised $245 million through a convertible note, bringing the startup’s total funding to $290 million after its emergence from stealth in March with a $45 million Seed round led by Greylock Partners.
Cylake funding and governance
The new investment round includes Lightspeed Venture Partners, Picture Capital and Redpoint Ventures. As part of the financing, Ravi Mhatre of Lightspeed will join Cylake’s board of directors, and Rakesh Loonkar of Picture Capital will serve as a board observer.
Cylake was founded at the beginning of 2026 by Nir Zuk, who serves as CEO, together with Wilson Xu and Ehud (Udi) Shamir. Zuk founded Palo Alto Networks in 2005 and served as the company’s CTO for more than two decades before announcing his departure last August. Xu helped build Palo Alto Networks for over a decade, including leading the engineering team. Udi Shamir co-founded SentinelOne in 2013.
AI-native platform and roadmap
The company is developing a complete, AI-native cybersecurity platform aimed at large organizations that operate under strict regulatory and security requirements, including government agencies, critical infrastructure operators and financial institutions. Cylake’s platform is designed to run entirely on-premises or in private cloud environments so customers can retain control over their data, infrastructure and operations rather than relying on public cloud providers.
Cylake says it is building the platform around a unified data foundation to give security systems a broader view of an organization’s data and infrastructure, rather than relying on fragmented tools that operate on partial information. The approach is intended to enable deployment of AI-based security capabilities while maintaining data sovereignty and operational control.
“We are building Cylake for organizations that cannot compromise between adopting advanced cybersecurity technology and maintaining control of their data and infrastructure,” said Zuk. “In those cases, the public cloud is not the right operating model. The architecture needs to be rebuilt around complete data, sovereignty, and control for an AI-native world. This investment lets us accelerate that work.”
Cylake is currently working with a group of design partners and has expanded its engineering and product teams since emerging from stealth. The company now has more than 40 employees and plans to continue hiring across engineering, product and other functions. It expects to release a beta version toward the end of 2026, with general availability planned for 2027.
