Cyera, the data security vendor valued at $9 billion, announced on April 23 that it has acquired Ryft, a secure data lake startup built specifically for AI agent workloads. Terms were not disclosed. The deal is Cyera’s fourth acquisition in five years and extends its platform from data security posture management into unified agent data governance.
Ryft was founded in 2024 by Yossi Reitblat, Yuval Yogev, and Guy Gadon, and raised an $8 million seed round from Index Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, according to TechFundingNews. The startup’s backers included members of the Wiz founding team and executives from Zscaler, CrowdStrike, Confluent, and Cisco.
What Ryft Adds
Ryft’s platform provides a managed data lake built on open-source standards for Apache Iceberg-format data, allowing companies to retain full control of their data without vendor lock-in. The managed layer handles optimization, compliance, disaster recovery, and governance automatically, according to CRN. The key capability for Cyera: Ryft’s data lake was designed from the ground up for AI agent workloads requiring clean, traceable data access at scale.
“The Ryft team brings deep expertise at the intersection of data and AI, and will play a key role as we build a unified data and AI control plane to help enterprises adopt agentic AI safely and at speed,” Tamar Bar-Ilan, co-founder and CTO of Cyera, said.
The combined platform creates a unified control plane that gives enterprises visibility into how AI agents access data, including the methods and permissions involved. This extends Cyera’s existing data security posture management (DSPM) capabilities, which already cover data discovery, classification, and protection, into the specific challenge of governing autonomous agent data access.
Cyera’s Acquisition Trajectory
The deal follows a pattern. Cyera acquired Trail Security in 2024 for $162 million, adding AI-powered data loss prevention to its platform, according to CRN. In January 2026, Cyera closed a $400 million Series F at a $9 billion valuation, bringing total funding raised since 2021 to more than $1.7 billion.
In March, Cyera launched Browser Shield for real-time visibility into AI tool usage within browsers, covering both managed and unmanaged AI tools. The Ryft acquisition extends this posture further, from monitoring human AI tool usage to governing autonomous agent data access.
Cyera plans to triple revenue over the next 12 months, targeting $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, with Europe expected to account for at least 25% of near-term income, according to TechFundingNews.
The Agent Data Security Market
The acquisition lands during a week when multiple vendors announced competing approaches to the same problem. Google unveiled its Agentic Data Cloud at Cloud Next 2026, and Rubrik launched Agent Cloud for governance on Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. The convergence signals that governing how autonomous agents access enterprise data is emerging as a distinct infrastructure category, separate from both traditional data security and AI model governance.
The market currently lacks a clear leader for agent-specific data security. Cyera’s bet is that combining DSPM with an agent-native data lake positions it to own the control plane layer before competitors can assemble equivalent capabilities through partnerships.