Cloud security giant Zscaler has announced the acquisition of Israeli cyber security startup Avalor for a reported $350 million.
The move will expand Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange platform to include Avalor’s Data Fabric for Security offering to help customers proactively identify and predict critical vulnerabilities and improve operational efficiencies.
Avalor’s solution helps organizations aggregate and correlate their security information for continuous risk management and features more than 150 pre-built third-party integrations.
The platform works to ingest, normalize, and unify data across enterprise security and business systems to serve up actionable insights and analytics.
In an announcement, Zscaler said Avalor’s extensive data foundation will help transform the AI capabilities of its Zero Trust Exchange platform with features such as customizable prioritization, streamlined reporting, zero-copy analytics, and real-time incident migration.
The addition is also expected to facilitate advanced threat detection, auto data discovery, classification, and policy generation.
“AI is only as good as the underlying data, and many solutions lack the additional context and knowledge from data sources across the enterprise to truly leverage security specific AI models,” explained Jay Chaudhry, Zscaler CEO, chairman, and founder.
“Zscaler operates the world’s largest security cloud with the most relevant data to train security specific large language models (LLMs) and with the Avalor acquisition, we can more effectively identify vulnerabilities, while predicting and preventing breaches.”
For Avalor, the acquisition comes just 26 months after the company’s founding and little more than a year after it successfully raised $30 million from investors, including Salesforce Ventures, Cyberstarts, and Jibe Ventures.
Headquartered in Ramat Gan, Israel, the firm was co-founded by Raanan Raz and Kfir Tishbi and has around 80 members of staff on its books.
Commenting on the development, Raz said Avalor will benefit from access to Zscaler’s 7000 customers, 4200 global channel partners, and resources it would otherwise have needed years to develop for itself.
“We have long understood that being able to make sense of all the disparate security data sources in an organization is essential to understanding and improving risk posture, that’s why we delivered the industry's first Data Fabric for Security to provide that aggregated platform,” Raz said.
“The first application running on our Data Fabric is our Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) module. By combining the Zscaler proprietary data sets with the 150 third-party sources Avalor supports, we will be in a prime position to enhance our UVM capabilities and create new applications with additional cyber protection insights.”
Zscaler’s acquisition of Avalor is its third Israeli buy in as many years. Back in April 2021, the company snapped up Trustdome for $40 million and then went on to purchase Canonic last February for an estimated $50 million.
