Cloud security giant Zscaler has announced the acquisition of Israeli cybersecurity startup Avalor for $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 efficiency.
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 business and enterprise security systems to deliver actionable insights and analytics.
In an announcement, Zscaler said Avalor's extensive database will help transform the AI capabilities of its Zero Trust Exchange platform with features such as customizable prioritization, streamlined reporting, copy-free analytics, and real-time incident migration.
The addition is also expected to facilitate advanced threat detection, automatic data discovery, classification and policy generation.
“AI is only as good as the underlying data, and many solutions lack the additional context and insight from enterprise-wide data sources to truly leverage security-specific AI models,” explained Jay Chaudhry, CEO, president and founder of Zscaler.
“Zscaler operates the world's largest security cloud with the most relevant data to train security-specific large language models (LLMs) and with the acquisition of Avalor, we can identify vulnerabilities more effectively, while predicting and preventing breaches.”
For Avalor, the acquisition comes just 26 months after the company was founded and just over a year after it successfully raised $30 million from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Cyberstarts and Jibe Ventures.
Headquartered in Ramat Gan, Israel, the company was co-founded by Raanan Raz and Kfir Tishbi and has around 80 staff on its books.
Commenting on the development, Raz said Avalor will benefit from access to Zscaler's 7,000 customers, 4,200 global channel partners and resources that it would have otherwise taken years to develop on its own.
“We have long understood that being able to understand all the disparate security data sources across an organization is essential to understanding and improving risk posture, which is why we delivered the industry's first Data Fabric for Security to provide that aggregate platform.” Raz said. .
“The first application running in our Data Fabric is our Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) module. By combining Zscaler’s proprietary data sets with the 150 third-party sources Avalor supports, we will be well positioned to enhance our UVM capabilities and create new applications with additional cyber protection insights.”
Zscaler's acquisition of Avalor is the third Israeli purchase in as many years. In April 2021, the company acquired Trustdome for $40 million and then bought Canonic last February for an estimated price of $50 million.
