Introduction
Orca Security was founded in 2019 by Avi Shua, a former chief technology officer at Check Point Software, and Gil Geron, a fellow veteran of the Israeli cybersecurity industry. The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, with substantial engineering operations in Tel Aviv, Israel, and additional offices in London and Los Angeles. Shua has said publicly that his time overseeing security architecture at Check Point convinced him that agent-based tools, built for an era of physical servers, could not keep pace with the scale and churn of cloud environments where workloads are created and destroyed continuously — a problem he and Geron set out to address by building a scanning approach that required no software footprint inside the workload itself. Like Wiz, Orca entered the market with an agentless approach to cloud security, but it arrived at that approach independently and slightly earlier, and has consistently marketed its patented SideScanning technology as the mechanism that makes it agentless: rather than installing sensors inside virtual machines, containers, or serverless functions, Orca takes read-only, out-of-band snapshots of cloud workload disks and configuration data directly through cloud provider APIs, then analyzes those snapshots for vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, exposed secrets, and identity and access risks.
The distinguishing claim behind SideScanning is coverage completeness without the operational friction of agent deployment — no performance impact on running workloads, no need to coordinate an agent rollout across every team that owns cloud infrastructure, and visibility into workloads that a security team may not even know exist. Orca combines the results of that scanning into what it calls a Unified Data Model, which is intended to correlate risk findings across a cloud environment and rank them by exploitability and business impact rather than presenting every finding as an equally urgent alert. This puts Orca squarely in the cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) category, competing most directly with Wiz, Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud, and, to a lesser extent, the cloud security modules of endpoint vendors like SentinelOne and CrowdStrike.
Orca's funding history spans five rounds since its 2019 founding: a seed round, a Series A in May 2020, a Series B of roughly $210 million in March 2021, and a Series C extension in October 2021 that brought its cumulative funding to approximately $640 million and its valuation to roughly $1.8 billion. Investors include YL Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, and Temasek, along with CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth equity fund — a detail worth noting given Google's much larger, separate acquisition of Wiz, Orca's closest direct competitor, which closed in March 2026. The company reports somewhere in the range of 350 to 385 employees as of the most recent available data, with primary offices in Portland, Tel Aviv, London, and Los Angeles, and lists customers including SAP, Autodesk, Gannett, Lemonade, and Digital Turbine. Public funding records available at the time of this review do not show a new priced round since the October 2021 Series C extension, though the company has remained operationally active, including a November 2022 patent grant for SideScanning, an IRAP security assessment for the Australian public sector in 2025, an expanded partnership with Zscaler announced in December 2025, and a North American distribution agreement with TD SYNNEX announced in April 2026.
Orca has also extended its platform toward AI-specific risk in the same period, introducing an autonomous 'Orca AI' capability aimed at accelerating detection, investigation, and response across cloud environments, alongside a dedicated 'Security for AI' feature set that scans an organization's own AI models, training data, and AI pipelines for exposure — treating an organization's internal AI infrastructure as a new category of cloud asset requiring the same posture management as any virtual machine or storage bucket. Orca was named a Leader in GigaOm's 2025 Radar Report for cloud-native application protection platforms, one of several third-party analyst evaluations the company cites in a market where Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and several smaller specialists compete for similar enterprise security budgets.
With Wiz now absorbed into Google Cloud, Orca is one of the more prominent remaining independent, agentless CNAPP vendors, which gives it particular relevance for security teams and Brel readers evaluating deployment-model trade-offs in cloud security — agentless scanning versus in-workload agents versus hybrid approaches — at a moment when several of the category's founding vendors have been acquired by, or built by, the same hyperscale cloud providers whose infrastructure they are meant to police.
What the company does
Agentless CNAPP platform using patented SideScanning technology for workload, identity, and configuration risk, plus Orca AI autonomous detection and a Security for AI module.
Who it serves
DevOps and security teams securing multi-cloud, cloud-native applications and their own internal AI infrastructure.
Company background
Founded 2019.Avi Shua, Gil Geron United States
Product and AI capabilities
Agentless CNAPP platform using patented SideScanning technology for workload, identity, and configuration risk, plus Orca AI autonomous detection and a Security for AI module.
Key developments
Headquartered in Portland, Oregon per official company records; no new priced funding round confirmed since the October 2021 Series C extension.
Why it matters
With Wiz now part of Google Cloud, Orca is one of the most prominent remaining independent, agentless CNAPP vendors, making it a key reference point for deployment-model comparisons in cloud security.
Sector context
See Brel’s Cybersecurity sector hub for related profiles.
Sources and references
Official: https://orca.security/about/