Nir Zuk spent two decades building Palo Alto Networks into a cybersecurity giant worth tens of billions. Now, seven months after retiring as CTO, he's raised $45 million to do something that might seem almost nostalgic: convince companies to keep their security data close to home.
The seed round, led by Greylock Partners, is unusually large for a company still working with design partners. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, announced a separate strategic investment later. Then again, Zuk isn't exactly unproven. He founded Palo Alto Networks back in 2005, and his co-founders at Cylake—Wilson Xu and Ehud "Udi" Shamir—both worked at the company. Shamir also helped start SentinelOne in 2013, adding another successful security exit to the team's collective résumé.
The pedigree explains the confidence, perhaps more than the product itself, which won't reach general availability until sometime in early 2027.
Why On-Premises Still Matters
Cylake's pitch is straightforward, if contrarian: not every organization can—or will—send sensitive security telemetry to someone else's cloud.
The company is building what it calls an "AI-native, data-driven cybersecurity platform" designed to run entirely on-premises or in private cloud environments. It's a unified stack, combining hardware and software to pull telemetry from networks, endpoints, cloud workloads, and existing security tools into a single local data foundation. That data never leaves the customer's infrastructure, which Cylake argues enables faster, "unthrottled" AI-driven analysis without the compliance headaches or bandwidth costs of cloud-based platforms.
It's a positioning that cuts against the grain. Most cybersecurity vendors have migrated to SaaS models over the past decade, chasing recurring revenue and easier deployment. But for governments, defense contractors, and heavily regulated enterprises—organizations that face strict data sovereignty requirements—public cloud tools remain a non-starter. Cylake is betting there's a wedge in that constraint, and a meaningful one.
Whether that wedge is wide enough to justify the valuation is another question.
A Familiar Board, A Strategic Signal
When Cylake announced its board in early April, the names read like a Palo Alto Networks reunion. Mark McLaughlin, the company's former CEO and chairman, signed on alongside Greylock's Jim Goetz and Asheem Chandna. All four directors—including Zuk—served together on Palo Alto Networks' board for over a decade. The continuity is intentional, signaling both strategic alignment and, presumably, access to the same playbook that worked before.
In-Q-Tel's involvement carries its own implications. The fund backs technologies with national security applications, and its participation suggests Cylake is positioning for government and defense contracts from the outset. That's not a small market—federal cybersecurity spending alone runs into the billions annually—but it is a notoriously complex one, with long sales cycles and exacting compliance requirements.
Still, if anyone knows how to navigate enterprise security bureaucracy, it's this team.
Timing the Rebound
Cylake's fundraise lands during what appears to be a broader recovery in cybersecurity venture activity. According to Pinpoint Search Group, cybersecurity funding in 2025 reached roughly $14 billion across 392 rounds. Momentum Cyber reported $3.8 billion in financing across 211 rounds in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
The company is working with select design partners now, though specifics remain scarce. LinkedIn lists Cylake's headcount at 11–50 employees, including René Bonvanie, who served as founding CMO at Palo Alto Networks, and Jesse Ralston as CTO. It's a lean operation, at least for now.
The underlying thesis is that AI raises the stakes for purpose-built security infrastructure—and that a meaningful slice of the market will choose sovereignty over convenience, even if it means bucking the SaaS trend. Whether Cylake can execute on that thesis, and at what scale, remains to be seen. But with this much capital, this much pedigree, and this much board-level firepower, they've certainly bought themselves time to find out.
