Zscaler acquires Avalor to integrate more AI into its security tools

Zscaler, a cloud security company headquartered in San Jose, California, has acquired cybersecurity startup Avalor 26 months after its founding, reportedly for $310 million in cash and equity.

In a press release announcing the news, Zscaler founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry stated that the deal would expand Zscaler’s platform with capabilities including streamlined reporting of security incidents, incident mitigation, asset discovery, data classification, security policy generation, and more.

“AI is only as good as the underlying data, and many solutions lack the additional context and knowledge from data sources across the enterprise to truly leverage security-specific AI models,” Chaudhry said in a press release. “Zscaler operates the world’s largest security cloud with the most relevant data to train security-specific large language models, and with the Avalor acquisition, we can more effectively identify vulnerabilities while predicting and preventing breaches.”

Avalor was co-founded by Raanan Raz and Kfir Tishbi, who previously led the engineering team at Datorama, a marketing analytics company acquired by Salesforce in 2018. Raz and Tishbi worked together at Datorama both leading up to — and after — the Salesforce purchase.

Avalor serves as a source of truth for cybersecurity assets, controls, identities, vulnerabilities, bugs, and other data points, allowing security teams to aggregate, normalize, de-duplicate, and track risk data from discovery to remediation.

While not a unique concept, Avalor stands out due to its ability to handle data from virtually any source in any format, along with its unique set of vulnerability risk management and prioritization tools.