Cyera’s Yotam Segev & Tamar Bar-Ilan on AI Security Juggernaut | Forbes Silicon & Steele
📅 Jun 30, 2026Cyera13 MIN21 VIEWS19 SEGMENTS · 3 SPEAKERS
Cyera Co-Founders Yotam Segev (CEO) and Tamar Bar-Ilan (CTO) joined Forbes' "Silicon & Steel" series to discuss how the startup became a $12 billion AI security juggernaut.
As autonomous AI agents and language models integrate into the enterprise, they ingest corporate data at an unprecedented rate. Yotam and Tamar break down how Cyera provides the automated visibility, data security posture management (DSPM), and guardrails needed to securely accelerate AI adoption.
They also address Cyera’s strategic platform growth, recent acquisitions like Trail Security, and why prioritizing digital tr...
What Yotam Segev said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Yotam Segev, cofounder of Cyera, said enterprises lack visibility into their sensitive data, a problem AI agents exacerbate because they can access data humans never touch. He described Cyera's products, including DSPM, OmniDLP, and agentic security, and highlighted how the platform detects misconfigurations and real-time threats, such as an employee leaking embargoed earnings to ChatGPT. Segev said the recent $600 million Series G at a $12 billion valuation will accelerate product development and strategic acquisitions, citing past successes with Trail Security, Rift, and Genie Security. He emphasized speed as critical, and expressed hope that in two years Cyera becomes the standard for secure AI adoption, safeguarding digital trust. He did not address the 80 times ARR multiple or cash burn concerns directly, leaving those to investor Logan Bartlett.
Key takeaways
Cyera raised $600 million in Series G at a $12 billion valuation, with total funding over $2 billion.
Segev said AI agents can access data humans never touch, creating new security risks that require automated visibility and control.
Cyera's platform detects agent misconfigurations and real-time threats, like an employee sharing embargoed earnings with ChatGPT.
Segev plans to use the new capital for strategic acquisitions, following successes with Trail Security, Rift, and Genie Security.
In two years, Segev hopes Cyera becomes the standard for secure AI adoption across enterprises.
Every enterprise we met with said data is the new oil. Data is our most important asset. We were very lucky to have started building in a time where AI became top of mind for every enterprise. As AI models and autonomous agents are rapidly plugged into the corporate world, they are consuming data at a rate not previously seen. But beneath the hype lies a massive multi-billion dollar vulnerability. Most major corporations have absolutely no idea what data they actually have or where it lives. Enter Cyera. In that world where data is moving from being in just one or two types of databases to being in hundreds and even thousands of types of systems in the cloud, in AI systems, in that world, being able to understand what data we have, where that data resides, how that data is being used by whom and for what purpose—it sounds so trivial, but to do it at enterprise scale and to do it at the speed of technology today is a huge challenge. And that was where the customers pointed us initially.
When we started out and started meeting with security teams, what we heard from pretty much everyone was, 'I don't know what sensitive data my organization has and I don't know where it is and what's happening with it.' Pretty scary notion, right? We saw the opportunity to solve this problem with models, with large language models, with small language models. And this is the really transformational technology that enables taking a problem that's been around for decades and hasn't really had a good solution and making it something that is solvable, feasible, and really works at enterprise scale.
Co-founders Yotam Segev and Tamar Barilan previously built and ran the cloud security division for the Israeli Defense Forces' Elite Unit 8200. Then in 2021, they launched Cyera, now one of the world's fastest growing AI native data security companies with integrations across tools like Microsoft Sentinel, ServiceNow, and Okta. As Cyera grows, so do the company's product offerings.
Cyera offers a DSPM product, data security posture management. It offers products in the DLP space like OmniDLP, which is a DLP orchestration and enhancement product with AI, and an endpoint client which is a replacement to the legacy endpoint DLP but also allows customers to secure AI on the endpoint like cloud co-work and others. Cyera offers products in the identity space to protect how identities interact with data and which identities—human and non-human—exist in the IT ecosystem of the enterprise, and in the agentic security space.
So probably one of the first aha moments is logging into just the data stores page and being able to see the hundreds or, in many cases, hundreds of thousands of data stores in your environment with a granular breakdown of every type of data, every file that's contained within each one. Most CISOs and CTOs have never had that kind of visibility before. And so it's just kind of like—I won't say like a kid in the candy shop—they want to just go and explore and see what's in there.
I think the most basic challenge enterprises are dealing with today with data security and AI is that we buried a lot of sins in the access people had to data that they never used. We all have access to millions of documents, countless data that we've never touched and will never touch as human beings. But agents are not like us. They move much faster. They read much faster and they are able to go through endless quantities of data. Everything and anything they can put their hands on is going to rise to the surface. A lot of the security at present state is just based on the fact that humans never look for it. They never dig all the way through. They never rummage through every drawer and try to find the secrets. And the agents do. And that's a material change that everybody is experiencing. The beautiful and powerful thing about agents is that they have this independence and autonomy and can really do a lot more than a simple application. But that's also a potential risk that needs to be managed and curtailed. In that sense, you really need the automated visibility and control into how these agents are behaving and what they're doing. We also detect issues that are associated with your AI tools or your agents. An issue is a violation, like a misconfiguration that might introduce risk. So in this case, we've identified that this agent is missing guardrails. Guardrails, you can think of them as controls around an agent to prevent it from doing something. So if someone asks a question about a topic you don't want, you can block them. This agent touches healthcare data, sensitive data, and it doesn't have any guardrails in place. So what we might recommend is to put guardrails in place to prevent it from sending sensitive data to the wrong person.
