Orca Security
Agentless cloud security platform built on patented SideScanning technology, an early co-pioneer of the agentless CNAPP category alongside Wiz.
Visit Website ↗Overview
Orca Security was founded in 2019 by Avi Shua and Gil Geron (both formerly of Check Point) with offices in Portland, Oregon, London and Tel Aviv. The company built its platform around patented “SideScanning” technology, which reads cloud workload data out-of-band via cloud provider APIs rather than installing agents, combined with a “Unified Data Model” correlating vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identity risk and sensitive data exposure across AWS, Azure and GCP.
Orca has raised roughly $630M from investors including YL Ventures, Redpoint, ICONIQ, Temasek, CapitalG and Splunk, reaching a reported $1.8B valuation. It holds AWS Advanced Technology Partner Security Competency and FedRAMP Moderate Authorization, and continues extending the platform toward AI workload security.
Orca and Wiz are frequently compared head-to-head as the two leading agentless CNAPP vendors, though Orca is meaningfully smaller in scale, headcount and disclosed funding than Wiz, with no recent (2024-2026) mega funding round found comparable to its rival’s trajectory.
Innovation Matrix Assessment
Continues extending SideScanning into AI-workload security (AI-SPM, AI code auditing) and cloud application security, keeping pace with category feature expectations.
Agentless, out-of-band scanning genuinely eliminates the deployment and performance overhead of agent-based scanners.
Unicorn valuation ($1.8B), but no major new funding round or comparable growth milestone found since its last major raise, now competing directly with a Google-backed Wiz.
Co-pioneered the agentless CNAPP model with patented SideScanning technology, a genuinely different approach from traditional agent-based scanners.
Holds AWS security competency and FedRAMP Moderate authorization, but no independent red-team or MITRE-style evidence of real-world efficacy was found beyond award recognition.
The agentless model it helped pioneer remains directionally correct for cloud-native security, though it now competes against a much larger, Google-backed Wiz.
Why CISOs Should Care
A CISO gets full cloud environment coverage within minutes via API-based scanning with no agents to deploy or maintain.
What Makes It Different
SideScanning reads workload data directly from the cloud provider's control plane and storage layer instead of running code on every workload, avoiding the agent-deployment burden of traditional CWPP tools.
The Matrix Verdict
70/100 — MEANINGFUL INNOVATOR
A genuine category co-pioneer with real architectural differentiation, landing in the upper-middle tier here because its funding and scale trail its closest rival and independent efficacy evidence is thinner than customer-adoption evidence.
Editorial Note: Claims vs. Verified Findings
Funding total, valuation, and investor list are drawn from Orca's own company page and third-party funding trackers, not audited financials (Orca is private); award and certification claims are independently listed by those third-party programs.
Sources
Alternatives to Orca Security
Wiz
Agentless, graph-based cloud security platform that maps multi-cloud risk end-to-end, now owned by Google after a record $32B…
Chainguard
Provides hardened, minimal, continuously-rebuilt container images and software packages to eliminate vulnerabilities before they reach production.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft's built-in cloud-native application protection platform, unifying CSPM, workload protection, and DevOps security natively across Azure, AWS, and…
Sysdig
The company behind Falco, the CNCF's runtime security standard, offering an eBPF/kernel-level CNAPP built on live syscall-based threat…
Upwind Security
Fast-growing, venture-backed CNAPP startup combining agentless scanning with eBPF runtime sensors for real-time cloud and AI workload risk…
Tenable Cloud Security
An agentless, graph-based cloud identity and posture platform, born as Israeli startup Ermetic, now folded into Tenable's exposure-management…