Cylake is a company founded by industry veterans to build a complete, AI-native, data-driven security platform for highly regulated organizations that require total data sovereignty, operating entirely on-premises or within private clouds. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Cylake founder and CEO Nir Zuk to learn more.
Nir Zuk’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Zuk said:
“I started my career when I was a teenager. I developed some of the first computer viruses of the world, and that somehow landed me a job with Israeli intelligence for five years. When I left the service, I joined a tiny Israeli startup, Check Point Software, which created the cyber security market as we know it today, and where I built the first firewall. From there, I founded OneSecure in the U.S. – the first intrusion prevention system (IPS) company, which was later acquired by NetScreen and then Juniper. In 2005, I left Juniper and founded Palo Alto Networks, which today is by far the largest cybersecurity vendor in the world. Last August, after 20 years, I left Palo Alto Networks and started Cylake in early 2026.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Zuk shared:
“The idea for Cylake came out of years of conversations with companies looking to secure their businesses. I was speaking to customers and colleagues in the industry and noticed that a lot of organizations felt left behind by the cybersecurity industry, who, starting with Palo Alto Networks, all moved to be delivered from the cloud. And it turns out that there are quite a few organizations out there that can’t consume cybersecurity services from the cloud, either because they are running in air-gapped environments, so they aren’t even connected to the internet, or because of regulatory reasons. In other words, they can’t or just don’t want to fight with the regulator, or they cannot send the data that’s needed to the cloud. And, of course, we’re seeing more and more organizations that are concerned about the geopolitical implications, especially of running or consuming a SaaS service from a US vendor or running things on US-owned public cloud infrastructure. So all these organizations are having a hard time consuming cybersecurity services from the cloud. They’re stuck with 25-year-old on-premises products like Splunk and McAfee, and they need a modern cybersecurity stack.”
“When you start a new company from scratch, you want to build the right architecture. And what we’ve seen over the last 10 to 15 years is that most cybersecurity products, across cloud, SaaS, AI, IoT, and data security, including data loss prevention products, all operate the same way. They each collect individual sets of data, which I call “puddles,” that are relevant to them. So IoT security will collect network data, cloud security will collect data from SaaS APIs, and so on. Those products collect the data, provide visibility into the data, and provide detection, but don’t provide response. You have to go to yet another tool for that, called security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR). So visibility, detection, response, and policy each operate on their own little data puddle. It turns out that process just doesn’t work anymore. Those products can be much, much, much better if they all had access to the entire data set.”
“The idea behind Cylake is to collect the superset of data in one place – a single data lake – and then run all these different security functions on top of it.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Zuk reflected:
“My favorite moment has been when we launched the company. The next day, we got hundreds of resumes from competitors, especially those that we had worked for in the past. People told us, ‘Hey, you’re doing the right thing. Our current employer is not doing the right thing. We want to join.’”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Zuk explained:
“We’re building a platform that, at its core, offers the data lake. It’s an automation platform, so anything that’s using our platform can use the automation tools. It also provides entity analytics. The first function we will deliver is the security operations (SOC) function, which replaces security information and event management (SIEM), endpoint detection and response (EDR), managed detection and response (MDR), identify threat detection and response (ITDR), user entity and behavior analytics (UEBA), and other detection technologies. It also replaces the SOAR.”
“The first functionality we will deliver will be around the end of the first calendar quarter of next year, 2027. We then very quickly plan to offer other functions, for example, data security, IoT, and OT security, and so on. The platform is currently being developed in close collaboration with design partners, with general availability planned for early 2027.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Zuk acknowledged:
“Recruiting, recruiting, recruiting. The biggest challenge is getting good people. You would think there are many places in the world where this can be developed. I think the only place it can be developed is in Silicon Valley – more specifically the South Bay Area – because it’s very hard nowadays to find engineers that have experience in building big, complicated systems. We’re talking about tens of racks that need to operate as a single system. And then you put cyber on top of it, it becomes even more challenging. I’ve found that there are only two places in the world where cyber is being developed: Silicon Valley and Israel. So the number of places where this can be done is extremely limited.”
“We address this by offering a great and intellectually challenging work environment, giving team members the authority to make decisions, and providing a highly competitive compensation package. That said, we don’t compromise on candidate quality.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Zuk cited:
“We’re still a young company, relatively speaking, but our launch from stealth in March 2026 with backing from Greylock Partners—who also backed Palo Alto Networks from the beginning—was very exciting. And adding IQT to our roster of investors a few weeks later was also a major milestone. Our philosophy on sovereignty and having a complete data foundation for cybersecurity has already spurred industry conversation, which we’ve enjoyed engaging with via our Substack.”
Funding/Revenue
Are you able to discuss funding and/or revenue metrics? Zuk revealed:
“We recently emerged from stealth with $45 million in seed funding, led by Greylock Partners. The funding is being used to develop the platform and refine its AI-native architecture.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Zuk affirmed:
“I haven’t seen anyone else developing an on-premises product. We’ve seen some vendors taking what we said at the launch and putting their own logo on it. We’ve seen a press release here and there, but no real substance. It’s easy to parrot, but essentially impossible to change your product to do what we do. We also haven’t seen any startups or major vendors saying we’re going to build or rebuild everything on-premises. Of course, you cannot take a cloud-based product and run it on-premises – you have to rebuild it from scratch.”
“We’re building the only fully sovereign, data-driven cybersecurity platform that operates entirely on-premises or in private cloud environments. Rather than sending operational and security data to public cloud-based analysis tools, we will bring everything together into a single, unified layer within the customer’s environment. We’ll use machine learning, GenAI, and automation to detect anomalies, generate alerts, remediate issues, and help incident response teams understand relationships across events. As such, we give customers the ability to collect and scale all data and detections exactly to their needs, on-premises, and under their full control.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Zuk concluded:
“We’re playing a long game. It’ll take a year to get to the first product and another year to get it to a point where we can go big. So, in the near term, we’re laser-focused on developing and refining the platform with our initial design partners.”
“Longer term, our vision is to bring cybersecurity ‘back home,’ giving organizations the ability to operate securely, at scale, on all their data and on their own infrastructure, and without compromise. By doing so, we can eliminate the tradeoffs that exist today between control, visibility, and capability, delivering a complete and transparent approach to defending against modern threats.”
