At Lightspeed, we’ve built a firm that seeks out the most ambitious founders of their generation, and few fit that profile better than Nir Zuk.
Twenty years ago, Nir looked at a rack of single-purpose security appliances and decided the category was wrong. He collapsed it into one platform and built Palo Alto Networks into one of the defining security companies of its era. We didn’t get to partner with Nir then. Today we fixed that.
Lightspeed is leading Cylake’s $245M financing.
Nir isn’t doing this alone. Wilson Xu ran engineering at Palo Alto Networks. Udi Shamir co-founded SentinelOne. Few founding teams we’ve seen have built more of the modern security stack, and they’ve all arrived at the same conclusion: security needs a new architecture.
The Problem
Ask a large enterprise how many security vendors it runs. The answer is often well over thirty. Thirty data silos. Thirty dashboards. Thirty bills. Security teams spend as much time stitching tools together as they do stopping attacks.
For regulated industries, it’s worse. Banks, governments, and critical infrastructure operators often can’t use the modern platforms built over the last decade because many of those platforms run in the cloud and their data isn’t allowed to leave the building for compliance and sovereignty reasons. The tools left to them can be more than twenty years old. The organizations with the most to lose are often running the oldest defenses.
This has been building for years. AI makes it urgent. Attacks are getting more sophisticated and harder to spot, right as enterprises generate more security data than any human team can watch.
What Cylake Is Building
Cylake delivers the complete appliance-based security stack inside the enterprise’s own walls: a private cloud of CPUs, GPUs, memory, and storage in the customer’s data center, or in facilities run by a managed service provider, with every stream of security data flowing into a single lake. Security functions become applications on that shared data, switched on as needed. Now, these organizations see their security posture as one picture instead of thirty fragments.
That architecture is what makes the AI work. Machine learning watches the data stream in real time and flags what deviates from the norm. When it finds something, LLMs investigate, explain what happened, and build the fix, working alongside the security team. And because it all runs on Cylake appliances that are owned by the customer, the marginal cost of intelligence is close to zero. With cloud-based security architectures, you pay for AI token by token. With Cylake’s architecture, you don’t.
The team that helped define the last era of security is building the next one. We’re proud to back them.
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