Cylake Raises $45M in Seed Funding to Scale On-Prem Security Platform
Regulated institutions don’t need more alerts. They need security that never has to ship their data somewhere else to work. Cylake steps onto the cybersecurity stage with $45M in seed funding and the kind of founding lineup that makes seasoned CISOs lean forward in their chairs. Greylock Partners led the round, with Asheem Chandna backing the vision. When Greylock writes that kind of check this early, it usually means they see a storm forming before the rest of the market hears the thunder.
At the center of it is Nir Zuk, Founder and CEO of Cylake. If the name rings familiar, it should. Nir Zuk built Palo Alto Networks into a security powerhouse by refusing to accept the industry’s habit of bolting together disconnected tools and calling it strategy. Now Nir Zuk is back in the lab with a new thesis. The future of cybersecurity is not a pile of disconnected alerts. It is data. Clean, unified, sovereign data that actually lives where the organization lives.
Nir Zuk is not building this alone. Cylake is co founded by Wilson Xu, a longtime engineering force behind Palo Alto Networks, and Ehud Udi Shamir, co founder of SentinelOne and a builder who understands how to turn serious math into serious protection. That trio reads like a cybersecurity supergroup. Different instruments, same band, and the music they are playing revolves around a simple idea that many security stacks forgot somewhere along the way. If you cannot control your data, you cannot control your defense.
That is where Cylake starts making noise. The platform is designed to run entirely inside a customer’s infrastructure, whether that is on premises or in a private cloud. No dependency on public cloud processing. No shipping sensitive data across someone else’s pipes. For governments, defense organizations, critical infrastructure operators, and heavily regulated financial institutions, that detail is not a feature. It is oxygen.
The name Cylake actually says a lot if you listen closely. Security teams have been drowning in streams of fragmented telemetry for years. Logs over here, endpoints over there, context scattered like puzzle pieces across dozens of tools. Cylake wants to gather all that water into one lake of data, then let AI swim through it with purpose. Detection, protection, and response built on a single foundation where context is not missing and visibility is not partial.
The business lesson here is as sharp as the technology. Legendary founders tend to return to the problems they know best, but they return with a different lens. Nir Zuk, Wilson Xu, and Ehud Udi Shamir are not chasing hype. They are solving a structural gap in a world where sovereignty, regulation, and infrastructure control are no longer edge cases. They are the main event. And if Cylake gets this right, the security market may start realizing that the safest cloud for some organizations is the one that never leaves their own sky.
