Orca Security

Orca pioneered agentless cloud security, and its patented SideScanning — reading workload data out-of-band from cloud snapshots rather than deploying agents on every machine — remains a genuine architectural advantage: full-stack, 100%-coverage visibility across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud, and Kubernetes in minutes, with no performance overhead or agent-maintenance burden. That approach anchors a complete CNAPP unifying vulnerability management, CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, DSPM, and API security in one platform in the fastest-growing subsegment of cloud security, a market projected toward $25B by 2028. Orca's position strengthened materially in 2025-2026 on two fronts. First, Google's $32B acquisition of arch-rival Wiz (closed March 2026) hands Orca the most valuable asset in the category — independence: enterprises wary of routing their entire cloud-security posture through Google, a competitor to the AWS and Azure clouds they run on, now have a neutral leading alternative, and Orca has pressed the advantage with aggressive pricing running 15-30% below Wiz on equivalent scope. Second, Orca sued Wiz for allegedly infringing its agentless patents, with a jury trial set for December 2025 — a case that, if it lands, could convert Orca's first-mover IP into a durable legal moat. FedRAMP Moderate authorization since February 2025 opens the federal market, and the May 2025 Opus acquisition pushes Orca toward AI-driven automated remediation. Net revenue retention above 120% shows the existing base keeps expanding.

Orca's last disclosed valuation is the $1.8B set in its October 2021 Series C extension — nearly five years stale — and in the interim Wiz rocketed from startup to a $32B Google exit, a divergence that tells the real story: Orca invented the category and Wiz won the market, reaching $500M ARR in 2024 and a projected $1B while out-executing Orca on go-to-market. Now Orca competes not against a startup but against Google's balance sheet and distribution, and its response — cutting price 15-30% below Wiz — is a margin-eroding admission that it is losing on product-led demand and must buy deals on cost. The patent suit is a two-edged gamble: a loss or a modest settlement removes Orca's last differentiating narrative, and even a win against a Google-owned defendant invites years of appeals rather than a quick moat. Structurally, the agentless-only approach that was Orca's founding advantage has been matched — Wiz and others ship agentless scanning too, and the market increasingly wants runtime and inline capabilities that pure snapshot-based scanning handles less well, while CrowdStrike, Palo Alto's Prisma Cloud, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud all bundle CNAPP into broader platforms. A ~200-500-person company on a five-year-old mark, undercutting on price against a hyperscaler-backed leader, is a difficult place from which to reach an outcome that rewards its later investors.