Cyera, the Israeli-founded data and AI security company valued at $9 billion, announced on April 23, 2026 that it had acquired Ryft, a startup that runs a secure, automated data lake for companies using AI agents. The companies did not disclose the price.
Calcalist and Globes, citing market estimates, put the deal at between $100 million and $130 million. Ryft had raised $8 million before the sale.
Ryft's roughly 15 employees, most of them in Israel, are joining Cyera's AI security group. Co-founder and CEO Yossi Reitblat will lead Cyera's AI security work. It is Cyera's fourth acquisition in five years.
What Ryft built
Ryft was founded in 2024 by Reitblat, chief technology officer Yuval Yogev and vice president of R&D Guy Gadon, according to Calcalist. Its platform gives enterprises fast, secure access to their data while tracking how employees and AI agents use it, and automates authorisation, classification and optimisation of that data.
SiliconANGLE reported that Ryft is built on an open-source standard, which the company says avoids vendor lock-in, and that it works alongside existing query engines and analytics tools without requiring customers to migrate data. Ryft's managed layer, built for the Apache Iceberg table format, handles optimisation, compliance, disaster recovery and governance.
Customers include Sonos, Unity and Voodoo, according to Cyera. Reitblat told Calcalist that the company had not been planning to sell or looking for a buyer.
“Enterprises shouldn’t have to choose between control and ease of use. From day one, our goal has been to give organizations the ability to fully own and govern their data, while still moving quickly.”
Why Cyera is buying
Cyera was founded in 2021 by CEO Yotam Segev and CTO Tamar Bar-Ilan to help companies find, classify and protect sensitive data in the cloud, and now markets itself as an AI security platform for the age of agents. Its argument is that AI agents are reaching into company data without the visibility and controls security teams need, and that tracing what an agent touches is harder than tracing what a person touches.
Co-founder and CTO Tamar Bar-Ilan said agents behave differently from people because they change identity depending on the task, the tools they use and the chain of delegation from other agents, so securing their use of data needs a different approach and infrastructure. She said the Ryft team would help Cyera build a unified control plane for companies adopting agentic AI.
Co-founder and VP R&D Yonatan Itai told Calcalist that Ryft brings deep technical expertise in a highly relevant area.
The founders and the funding
Ryft came out of stealth in July 2025 with an $8 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with Bessemer Venture Partners joining, according to Index. Members of Wiz's founding team and executives from Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Confluent and Cisco also invested. All three founders served in the Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 and have been friends since high school, Index said, and the money was earmarked for hiring engineers and building out sales. At the estimated price, the sale is worth more than 12 times the capital Ryft raised.
Reitblat said in Cyera's announcement that data is a company's most strategic advantage in the age of AI and that enterprises should not have to choose between control and ease of use. He said joining Cyera would let Ryft bring control and security together around the data that powers AI.
Cyera's buying spree
Cyera has raised more than $1.7 billion from investors including Accel, Blackstone, Cyberstarts, Georgian, Lightspeed and Sequoia. In January 2026 it raised a $400 million Series F at a $9 billion valuation, tripling its valuation in a year, SiliconANGLE reported.
Its customers include Paramount, Chipotle and Valvoline. The buying continued after Ryft. About a month later Cyera acquired Genie Security, and in June 2026 it raised another $300 million at a $12 billion valuation in a round led by Evolution Equity Partners, taking its total funding above $2 billion, Calcalist reported.
