Modern businesses generate a lot of security data, but legacy tools like Splunk still require companies to store it all in one place before they can detect threats — a slow and expensive process that’s further broken down in cloud environments where volumes explode and data lives everywhere.

AI cybersecurity startup Vega Security wants to flip that approach by running security where data already lives, implementing cloud services, data lakes, and storage systems. And the two-year-old company recently raised a $120 million Series B round to scale that vision, TechCrunch has learned exclusively.

Led by Accel with participation from Cyberstarts, Redpoint, and CRV, the new round nearly doubled Vega’s valuation to $700M and brought its total funding to $185 million, money the startup will use to develop its AI-native security operations suite, grow its go-to-market team, and expand globally.

Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch that the current operating model of SIEM (security information and event management) – the dominant technology in this domain for the past two decades – is not only “crazy expensive,” but also increasingly causes AI-native security operations to fail. In complex cloud environments, he said, the current model often increases exposure to threat actors.

“Vega defines a new operating model that allows organizations to use the full potential of their business data to achieve incident response readiness, without all the complexity, cost, drama,” Shay Sandler, co-founder and CEO of Vega, told TechCrunch. “We want to enable them to achieve AI-native detection response capability wherever the data is, at scale.”

Like many cybersecurity founders, Sandler did his time in the cybersecurity unit of the Israeli military before becoming one of the founding employees behind Granulate, which Intel got $650 million in 2022. After a year at Intel, Sandler decided to “do it big time in the cybersecurity world.”

That pedigree is partly what caught the attention of Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner at Accel. But it’s also Vega’s ambitious approach to security management in a market already dominated by one player: Splunk.

Brasoveanu told TechCrunch that legacy SIEM companies like Splunk, which Acquired Cisco in 2024 at $28 billion, have been criticized in recent years because their solutions are difficult to scale. They fail to process the insane increase in AI-driven data volumes.

“Splunk and every contender since has always been data-centric, but by doing that you’re essentially holding the customer hostage,” Brasoveanu said.

However, sometimes it is easier to hate the status quo than to do the work of making a transition to a better alternative, a disadvantage of any startup that tries to break the budgets of the business that is understood. That’s why Sandler said that Vega’s “North Star” will not only create a solution that is more cost-effective and better at detecting the threat, but “to make it as drama-free, as easy as possible for the largest, most complex enterprises in the world to adopt it within minutes.”

Vega’s method seems to be effective. The 100-person startup has already signed multi-million-dollar contracts with banks, healthcare companies, and Fortune 500 firms, including cloud-heavy companies like Instacart.

“The only reason they do that in a two-year startup is because the problem is so painful and other solutions on the market require an unrealistic expectation that the business will change the way they operate or do a two-year data migration,” Sandler said. “Vega allows them to plug and play and achieve immediate value in detection response.”