Orca Security today said it closed a $210 million Series C funding on a $1.2 billion valuation that pushed the cloud security startup from seed to cybersecurity unicorn in two years. The company has spent the last two years building and selling a comprehensive cloud security platform “that actually works,” and it plans to use the new investment to scale the company and win customers from Palo Alto Networks.

Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, and Redpoint Ventures led the round and brings Orca Security's total raised to almost $300 million. It also follows a successful 2020 during which the startup saw more than 1,000% year-over-year growth. CEO Avi Shua boasts about Orca’s “dozens” of companies that talk publicly about using Orca’s platform, which is unusual for a 2-year-old security startup, and many of these used to be “Palo Alto logos that moved on to become Orca logos,” he said.

Ocra’s customer list includes Akamai, Robinhood, Databricks, Unity, Live Oak Bank, Lemonade, and BeyondTrust.

“Winning this market is not going to be based on only on making the best product,” Shua said. “When we are competing against Palo Alto we need a dramatically larger team that goes and reaches more areas of the market to glean more opportunities. Strategically, this market is not going to be won by whether we win 70% or 90% of the [proof of concepts] that we start. It’s a cool metric, but most important is how many deals, how many people try Orca when they’re shopping for a cloud security solution.”

To this end, Orca plans to have nearly tripled its research and development and sales teams, compared to its 20-ish employees it had at the time of its Series A round in May 2020. It’s now grown to about 100 employees, Shua said.

It also plans to expand its sales offices in Europe, and it recently opened a new office in Australia. At the same time, Orca is expanding its partner program across Europe, adding new partnerships in the U.K. and Germany.

The cloud security startup also plans to expand its platform’s capabilities, Shua said. Its platform provides agentless workload security and compliance across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). It does this using Orca’s patented SideScanning technology that both detects and prioritizes companies’ cloud-security risks.

Looking ahead to 2021, Orca plans to add more identity and access management capabilities and also help developers and security teams build and deploy security earlier into the workload’s lifecycle, Shua said. “It all boils down to the original philosophy of something that is comprehensive, fully covers your environment, and is context aware,” he said.

It’s important to build these capabilities internally, rather than acquire them from other companies, to ensure that the technology works, Shua added.

“It’s extremely hard to integrate,” he explained. “This is the mistake that Palo Alto made. They bought five startups, they bought five solutions, and each one of them is nice, but I’ve been working with companies that tried to use that and they told me, you know, if I add six additional people, then I could use it. It’s integrating five tools that speak different languages, they don't really connect the dots together. And in security connecting the dots together is everything.”

The fact that Orca built its technology gives it an advantage over its larger counterpart, Shua said, and it also ensures that Orca’s agentless security covers 100% of customers’ environments. Agent-based tools, like Palo Alto Networks’ Prisma Cloud, Shua claims, can’t provide this level of comprehensive coverage — and this is a battle that both companies have waged with lawyers as well as in the blogosphere.

“Palo Alto took the approach of trying to use legal efforts to silence us,” he said. “They bailed out of that, and a few weeks back posted a blog explaining why Orca’s SiteScanning technology is rudimentary. Naturally, we responded.”

Looking ahead, Shua sees a market reaching upwards of $70 billion over the next seven years, and he’s confident that customers will choose his product.

“The cloud market is around $100 billion today,” he said, referencing Gartner’s public cloud forecasts, “and reaching $1 trillion in seven to eight years. Traditionally, cybersecurity is around 5%, 6% percent of this market. So the market is around $5 billion today, it's going to reach $50 billion to $70 billion in seven years. So definitely there’s a lot of blue ocean, as we call it in Orca.”