Nir Zuk built Palo Alto by defying conventional wisdom. Now he’s betting against the cloud.
The 54-year-old legendary cybersecurity entrepreneur, with a personal fortune of about $1.5 billion, has raised $45 million for Cylake, a new venture aimed at organizations that cannot rely on public cloud infrastructure.
Only months after retiring from Palo Alto Networks, the company he founded two decades ago, cybersecurity entrepreneur Nir Zuk is again positioning himself as the industry’s chief contrarian.
His new startup, Cylake, has raised $45 million in Seed funding from investors led by Greylock to develop a comprehensive, AI-driven cybersecurity platform designed to run entirely on-premises or within private cloud environments. The premise runs directly against one of the technology industry’s most powerful currents: the steady migration of security infrastructure into the public cloud.
For Zuk, however, the shift toward cloud-delivered cybersecurity has gone too far.
“The industry has overrotated toward delivering everything in the cloud, and that has left many of the most important customers stuck 20 years behind,” Zuk said in an interview with Business Insider.
That argument reflects a familiar pattern in Zuk’s career. Twenty years ago, when he launched Palo Alto Networks, the industry reacted with similar skepticism when he suggested companies would use the cloud to consume cybersecurity services.
Palo Alto Networks, which he founded in 2005 and helped lead as chief technology officer for more than two decades, has grown into the world’s largest standalone cybersecurity company. His personal fortune is estimated by Forbes at around $1.5 billion.
Cylake is built around two ideas that Zuk believes the industry has neglected.
The first is architectural. Modern cybersecurity systems, he argues, increasingly rely on fragmented tools that operate across separate layers of an organization’s infrastructure. Cylake’s approach is to build a unified platform capable of analyzing data across the entire environment, enabling AI-driven security decisions based on complete context.
The second principle is data sovereignty.
Many of the world’s largest and most regulated institutions, including governments, defense organizations and critical infrastructure operators, cannot rely on public cloud systems for sensitive security operations because of regulatory, operational or national security restrictions.
Yet these organizations often find themselves locked out of the most advanced cybersecurity technologies, which are increasingly delivered as cloud services.
“I heard from customers over the years that they wish they could use the products that we were pitching to them, but they couldn’t because they were in the cloud,” Zuk said. “It’s not something that a company that’s built around delivering everything that it has from the cloud can solve.”
Cylake’s platform is therefore designed to run entirely within an organization’s own infrastructure, either on-premises or in a private cloud environment, while still delivering advanced AI-based detection and response capabilities.
Cylake was founded by 54-year-old Zuk together with Wilson Xu, a longtime Palo Alto Networks engineering leader, and Ehud (Udi) Shamir, a co-founder of SentinelOne.
“Cybersecurity is constantly evolving, and sometimes new challenges demand completely new approaches,” Zuk said when announcing the company. “Cylake is for institutions where maintaining full control over data and operations is not optional.”
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The move represents a new chapter for Zuk after a career that has been defined by technical conviction and a willingness to challenge industry orthodoxy.
When he announced his retirement from Palo Alto Networks last year, he said the decision came after the company finally achieved the vision he had outlined when founding it: a unified cybersecurity platform spanning every major defensive category.
“Palo Alto Networks has finally achieved the vision that I set 20 years ago,” he said at the time, pointing to the company’s expansion across network security, endpoint protection, cloud security, identity management and other fields.
The company’s $25 billion acquisition of CyberArk, he argued then, completed that vision.
“And now I can retire from Palo Alto Networks with peace,” he said.
Retirement, however, appears to have lasted only briefly.
