We are excited to announce that Greylock led a $45M seed round in Cylake, a startup focused on building the industry’s leading AI-native cybersecurity for customers that require total data sovereignty.
Cylake is founded by three cybersecurity veterans, who have shaped the modern security landscape. Nir Zuk, who founded Palo Alto Networks out of a tiny office at Greylock in 2005, served as CTO for over two decades. Nir guided the company from a scrappy startup into the industry’s most valuable cybersecurity player. Wilson Xu spent more than a decade at Palo Alto Networks, including leading the entire engineering organization. Ehud (Udi) Shamir, who co-founded SentinelOne in 2013, helped grow the company for over five years, and most recently served as a distinguished engineer at Palo Alto Networks.
Cylake is building the next generation of cybersecurity: AI-native, agentic, and built on holistic data and context. Effective AI-native security requires a complete view of all data and context, as well as a unified platform for protection. Yet some of the world’s largest and most targeted organizations cannot, for regulatory or security reasons, rely on public cloud-based products. Cylake is built to deliver AI-native security entirely within the customer’s own sovereign environment, serving a market where cybersecurity innovation hasn’t kept up.
Nir is a brilliant technologist who is customer-centric and is a magnet for talent. Nir and I have a long history together. We met in 1996 when Check Point Software was a tiny company, and we worked closely together. When Nir started Palo Alto Networks in 2005 to take a clean sheet approach to reinventing the firewall, we had the privilege of being a founding investor and part of the company’s journey from day zero.
Greylock has a distinguished track record backing outlier founders at company inception. We are excited to partner with the Cylake team to build an AI-driven, secure future for customers with data sovereignty requirements. Visit https://www.cylake.com to learn more.
