Cylake says nothing leaves the building
· re: Cylake: modern security now works where the internet doesn't (cylake.com)
Cylake’s website is worth the click for the tagline alone: “Modern security now works where the internet doesn’t.”
The short version: Nir Zuk, who founded Palo Alto Networks and spent two decades as its CTO, raised US$45 million in seed funding led by Greylock this March to build AI-native security as a rack-mounted appliance for air-gapped networks. No cloud, no phoning home. Their words: “Nothing leaves the building unless you carry it out.”
My read: when the man who built the defining network-security company of the cloud era launches a product whose entire pitch is that your data never leaves your premises, “sovereign” has officially stopped being a niche word. I made a version of this bet in 2012 with Podzy, an encrypted, fully on-premise alternative to Dropbox, back when swimming against the cloud tide looked eccentric. Cloud repatriation has been building for a while; this is the loudest confirmation yet.
Adjacent lane to mine, to be clear. Cylake’s pitch is full visibility, fine-grained policy and stopping attacks in fully air-gapped environments. The fine-grained policy is network and threat policy, as far as I can tell; mine is governing what data people and AI agents are allowed to read.
But the underlying conviction is identical. For some organisations the data cannot leave, so the tooling has to come to it (apparently even the AI now arrives by forklift).
Net: Zuk now has US$45 million of Greylock-led money behind the premise that the data stays in the building. Worth watching.