Cylake Raises $245M for Sovereign, On-Premises AI Security

Cylake has raised $245 million through a convertible note to develop an AI-native cybersecurity platform that runs on customer premises and in private cloud environments. The company plans a beta release by the end of 2026 and general availability in 2027.

The financing brings Cylake’s total funding to $290 million after a $45 million seed round led by Greylock Partners when the company emerged from stealth in March 2026. Investors in the latest round include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Picture Capital and Redpoint Ventures.

Lightspeed partner and co-founder Ravi Mhatre will join Cylake’s board of directors. Picture Capital partner Rakesh Loonkar will serve as a board observer.

Cylake was founded by Nir Zuk, Wilson Xu and Ehud “Udi” Shamir. Zuk founded Palo Alto Networks and served more than two decades as its chief technology officer. Xu held engineering leadership roles at Palo Alto Networks. Shamir co-founded SentinelOne and later worked at Palo Alto Networks as a senior developer and security researcher. René Bonvanie, formerly chief marketing officer at Palo Alto Networks, has also joined the startup.

The company says the platform will aggregate data and context from across an organization’s systems into a single foundation to support protection and AI-driven security workflows. Cylake built the product to operate entirely on customer premises or in private clouds to meet data sovereignty requirements and to address visibility gaps that arise when multiple security tools each see only part of an organization’s data.

Since emerging from stealth, Cylake has grown to more than 40 employees and plans to expand hiring across engineering, product and other functions. The company intends to use the new funding to accelerate product development and scale its team ahead of the beta and public release.

In the company’s funding announcement, Zuk wrote that Cylake targets organizations that must combine advanced cybersecurity technology with control over their data and infrastructure. He added that for those customers public cloud is not the right operating model and that architecture needs to be rebuilt around complete data, sovereignty and control for an AI-native world.

Cylake positions its offering for government agencies and highly regulated enterprises that restrict use of third-party cloud services. The startup differentiates itself from security vendors that operate primarily from public cloud platforms.