Zscaler, a cloud safety firm with headquarters in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in money and fairness.
In a press launch announcing the information, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry mentioned that the deal would increase Zscaler’s platform with capabilities together with streamlined reporting of safety incidents, incident mitigation, asset discovery, knowledge classification, safety coverage era and extra.
“AI is only as good as the underlying data, and many solutions lack the additional context and knowledge from data sources across the enterprise to truly leverage security-specific AI models,” Chaudhry mentioned in a press launch. “Zscaler operates the world’s largest security cloud with the most relevant data to train security specific large language models, and with the Avalor acquisition, we can more effectively identify vulnerabilities while predicting and preventing breaches.”
Raanan Raz co-founded Avalor with Kfir Tishbi, who beforehand led the engineering workforce at Datorama, a advertising and marketing analytics firm acquired by Salesforce in 2018. Raz and Tishbi labored collectively at Datorama each main as much as — and after — the Salesforce buy.
Avalor acts as a supply of fact for cybersecurity belongings, controls, identities, vulnerabilities, bugs and different knowledge factors, permitting safety groups to mixture, normalize, de-duplicate and monitor threat knowledge from discovery to remediation.
It’s not a singular idea. An array of startups on the market deal with the identical downside, like Securiti and Dig Safety. However what units Avalor aside is the power to deal with knowledge from just about any supply in any format, and its distinctive set of vulnerability threat administration and prioritization instruments.
Previous to the Zscaler acquisition, Avalor managed to safe $30 million from traders, together with TCV, Salesforce Ventures, Jibe Ventures and Cyberstarts. And Raz sees Zscaler taking the enterprise — and its ~80-person workforce unfold throughout the U.S. and Israel — additional.
“[With Zscaler, ] we get instant access to a set of resources it would have taken years for us to develop organically — 7,000 customers, 4,200 channel partners globally, near-ubiquitous customer awareness and the validation of a $2 billion business behind us,” Raz wrote in a post on Avalor’s weblog printed Thursday morning. “We’ll continue to operate independently as a complete Avalor team, and we’ll have all the tailwinds of the amazing Zscaler resources helping us.”
Avalor is Zscaler’s third acquisition after Canonic, a startup targeted on defending towards cyberattacks concentrating on software-as-a-service merchandise, and Trustdome, a cloud infrastructure entitlement platform. Based in 2007 by Chaudhry and Ok. Kailash, Zscaler — which went public in March 2018 — has ~7,000 workers and a market cap of about $30 billion.
As Crunchbase’s Chris Metinko noted earlier right this moment, Zscaler’s acquisition — together with others within the cybersecurity house — might assist spark exercise in a slow-to-stagnant cyber M&A market. Final 12 months noticed solely 66 M&A offers involving VC-backed cybersecurity startups, per Crunchbase — a 26% drop from 2022 (which noticed 89 such offers) and greater than a 50% decline from 2021 (139 offers).
Up to now in 2024, there have been 18 cybersecurity-related mergers and acquisitions, with particularly notable strikes being made by Wiz, SentinelOne and CrowdStrike.
