An Israeli cybersecurity company founded by veterans of the army’s elite Unit 8200 intelligence division has raised $150 million to help businesses keep sensitive data out of the reach of the AI agents now spreading through their systems, the company announced Wednesday.
Sentra said the strategic investment was led by Capital One Ventures, joined by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Zeev Ventures, Standard Investments, Munich Re Ventures and Key1 Capital. A Capital One representative will join the company’s board. The investment brings Sentra’s total funding to more than $250 million. The company did not disclose the valuation; chief executive Yoav Regev said it has tripled since the previous funding round, and it remains below $1 billion.
The company says it grew more than 300% over the past year and now serves about 100 large enterprise customers in the United States and Europe, with revenue in the tens of millions of dollars. Those figures are Sentra’s own; the company is privately held and does not publish audited results.
Server cabinets in a data center (Indrajit Das / CC BY-SA 3.0).
Founded in 2021, Sentra employs 130 people, 65 of them in Tel Aviv, with headquarters in New York and Tel Aviv. Its founders are Regev, who headed Unit 8200’s cyber department; Asaf Kochan, a former commander of the unit; Ron Reiter, who ran Oracle’s Tel Aviv development center; and Yair Cohen, who held senior product roles at Microsoft and Datadog.
The problem it sells against is new. Companies are deploying AI assistants and autonomous agents faster than security teams can track them, and each agent can read corporate data at machine speed, often with permissions inherited from human users. Sentra’s platform works one layer down: instead of watching every request an agent makes, it finds and locks down the sensitive data itself, inside the customer’s own environment, before an agent can reach it.
The new money is earmarked for product development around AI security and for expansion. Sentra says it plans to double its workforce in Israel and the United States, open a London office and enter the U.S. federal market, with federal sales expected to begin in the second half of 2027. It is also weighing an acquisition in areas such as data loss prevention and identity management. Those are announced plans, not completed steps.
What it means: as businesses hand more work to AI agents, the question of what those agents can see is becoming a boardroom issue. Sentra’s bet, now backed by the venture arm of one of America’s biggest banks, is that companies will pay to secure the data itself rather than chase every agent. Regev says the race is still open: he names Cyera and Varonis as competitors and says no clear leader has emerged.
JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv
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