Orca Security Hits $1.2B Valuation After $210M Series C 

Los Angeles-based cloud security provider Orca Security has landed a $210 million Series C; giving it a $1.2 billion valuation and lifting the company’s total amount of funding raised in the last 10 months to $285 million.

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The new round was led by Alphabet’s growth fund, CapitalG, and Redpoint Ventures.

The Series C comes just more than three months after closing a $55 million Series B, and 10 months after closing its Series A.

Avi Shua, Orca’s co-founder and CEO, said raising the Series C so close to its previous round is simply a case of the company seeing an exploding market and wanting to take advantage of a “unique opportunity,” as more companies look for security tools to keep assets safe in the cloud.

“It’s only been a few months (since the Series B), but a lot has happened,” he said. “Everyone is moving to the cloud. We just need to go faster.”

Guarding the cloud

Orca’s cloud-native solution reads a company’s cloud configuration and can detect malware, misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities. The platform is compatible with major public clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Cloud security has become a hot commodity as more enterprises move to the cloud — especially during the pandemic when workforces became more dispersed and therefore susceptible to attacks.

“There is a realization that security is paramount,” said Gene Frantz, general partner at CapitalG. “Especially with companies recognizing the old tools just won’t work in the cloud.”

The company finished last year beating its aggressive forecast with growth of more than 1,000 percent, Shua said. Orca also grew its staff in the last year from 20 people to now more than 90, he added.

Even with that growth, Orca had barely touched the money from the previous round. Now with the larger warchest the company can go even faster, Shua said.

Orca plans to expand the verticals it sells into and also expand internationals; reaching further into both Europe and Asia Pacific, he added.

Big money

Although Orca has raised large sums of cash, other cybersecurity players have spent significant money to compete in the cloud space. Cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks bought RedLock for $173 million in 2018 and followed that with acquiring Twistlock for $410 million and PureSec for an undisclosed amount last year. Last April, Rapid7 bought cloud security posture management company DivvyCloud for about $145 million.

Shua said unlike those companies that have bolted-on solutions to sell into the market, Orca was built for the cloud and customers will be able to see the difference.

Frantz said he sees Orca’s market as perhaps the largest in all of cybersecurity and has no doubt what could be in the company’s future.

“The market is so large,” he said. “Orca could not (introduce any) new products and still be a large public company. It’s that big.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman