Cylus

Cylus is a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company built specifically for railway and metro operators, a corner of critical infrastructure that runs on signaling systems, communication-based train control, and legacy OT protocols never designed with cyber threats in mind. Founded in 2017 by Miki Shifman and Amir Levintal, the company builds network detection and monitoring purpose-built for rail-specific protocols and topologies, an area generic industrial-OT security vendors typically don’t cover in depth.

The company has raised roughly $57M across multiple rounds, starting with a $4.7M seed round backed by Magma Venture Partners and the Israeli arm of Vertex Ventures, and growing through a Series B led by Ibex Investors with participation from Vertex Growth Fund and rail-industry-adjacent investor Alstom, the French rolling-stock and signaling giant. Alstom’s participation is a notable strategic signal — a major rail equipment manufacturer investing suggests real industry validation of Cylus’s rail-specific approach, beyond generic venture interest.

For security and OT teams at railway operators and metro systems, Cylus addresses a narrow but high-consequence category: rail networks are critical infrastructure where an undetected intrusion can affect physical safety, not just data confidentiality, and few vendors have built monitoring specifically tuned to rail signaling and control protocols. Its relevance is inherently limited to the rail/transit sector rather than general enterprise security, but within that niche the strategic investor base and sustained multi-round funding are real, checkable signals of traction.