If you followed Israeli cyber news this year, you may have noticed a pattern. Varonis was sold for $6.3 billion. Cyera is reportedly in talks to raise at a valuation of about $20 billion. Sentra raised $150 million this week. And according to Calcalist, CrowdStrike is in talks to acquire Orion Security. All these companies work in the same field: data security. So what is it, and why is it worth so much?
Most traditional cybersecurity is about perimeters: firewalls that block entry to the network, antivirus that stops malicious software running, identity management that ensures only authorized people get in. Data security starts from a different question: assume someone is already inside, or an employee made a mistake. Where exactly is our sensitive data, who can access it, and who actually does? In a large organization, with millions of files across clouds, systems and folders nobody remembers, that answer is far from simple.
Companies in the field, sometimes called DSPM (Data Security Posture Management), scan all of an organization's data stores, identify what is sensitive, such as customer details, medical information or source code, and show who is exposed to it. They alert when something is wrong, for example a file with card numbers open to all staff, or an employee suddenly downloading an unusual amount of data.
What made the field so sought after is AI. Organizations are connecting AI tools and agents to internal data so they can answer questions, write documents and perform tasks. But an AI agent sees everything it has permission to see. If a salary file or confidential contract is accidentally open, an agent may show it to an employee who should not see it, or to an attacker who manages to manipulate it. Before giving AI access to data, you must know what that data is and who should see it.
Why Israel? Because the field combines what Israeli industry is especially good at: a deep understanding of how attackers think, the ability to process huge amounts of data, and speed in spotting new problems. Varonis, founded by Israeli entrepreneurs, worked on 'who accesses which data' long before it was fashionable. The new generation takes that question into the era of cloud and AI, and investors are betting it will be one of cyber's biggest markets in the coming years.
