Vega raises $120M Series B to rethink how organizations detect cyber threats

Modern organizations generate massive amounts of security data, but legacy tools like Splunk still require companies to store it all in one place before they can detect threats — a slow, expensive process that increasingly breaks down in cloud environments where volumes are increasing and data lives everywhere.

AI cybersecurity startup Vega Security wants to upend this approach by running security where the data already lives, implementing it in existing cloud services, data lakes, and storage systems. The two-year-old company just raised a $120 million Series B round to scale that vision, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.

Led by Accel with participation from Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and CRV, the new round nearly doubles Vega’s value to $700 million and brings its total funding to $185 million, money that the startup will use to further develop its AI-driven security operations suite, strengthen its go-to-market team, and expand globally.

Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch that the current operating model for SIEM (security information and event management) — the dominant technology in this space for the past two decades — is not only “insanely expensive,” but is also increasingly causing native AI security operations to fail. In complex cloud environments, the current model often increases exposure to threat actors, he says.

“Vega has defined a new operating model that enables organizations to leverage the full potential of their enterprise data to achieve incident response preparedness, without all the complexity, cost and drama,” Sandler told TechCrunch. “We simply want to enable them to have access to the ability to respond to AI detection anywhere there is data, at scale.”

Like many cybersecurity founders, Sandler spent his time in the Israeli military’s cybersecurity unit before becoming one of the founding employees behind Granulate, which Intel acquired for $650 million in 2022. After a year at Intel, Sandler decided to “do it for a long time in the cybersecurity world.”

This lineage is partly what caught the attention of Andrei Brasovino, a partner at Accel. But it was also Vega’s ambitious approach to managing security in a market already dominated by one player: Splunk.

Brasovino told TechCrunch that legacy SIEM companies like Splunk, which Cisco acquired in 2024 for $28 billion, have been criticized in recent years because their solutions are difficult to scale. They have failed to address the insane rise in data volumes driven by AI.

“Splunk and every competitor since have always centralized data, but by doing so you are holding the customer hostage,” Brasovino said.

However, sometimes it’s easier to hate the status quo than to work toward shifting to a better alternative, a pitfall that any startup trying to bust enterprise budgets understands. That’s why Sandler says Vega’s “North Star” aimed not just to build a solution that was more cost-effective and better at detecting threats, but “to make it as simple as possible for the world’s largest and most complex organizations to adopt in a matter of minutes.”

Vega’s approach seems to be working. The 100-person startup has already signed multi-million-dollar contracts with banks, healthcare companies and Fortune 500 companies, including cloud-heavy companies like Instacart.

“The only reason they would do this to a two-year-old startup is because the problem is so painful and other solutions on the market require an unrealistic expectation that the company will change the way it does business or migrate data for two years,” Sandler said. “Vega enables them to just plug and play and realize the value of instant detection response.”