Cisco acquiring Israeli startup Lightspin for $200-250 million

U.S. tech giant Cisco is in advanced negotiations to acquire Israeli cybersecurity startup Lightspin, Calcalist has learned. According to Calcalist estimations, Cisco is set to pay $200-250 million for the Israeli company. Lightspin has raised a total of $25 million to date, including from Dell Technologies Capital, IBM, and Ibex Investors. The deal is set to provide the investors with a handsome return on their money.

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The companies refused to comment on the deal.

The Israeli company employs over 50 people who will join Cisco. Lightspin’s cloud security solution competes with those of fellow Israeli companies Wiz and Orca, as well as the likes of Palo Alto Networks.

Lightspin co-founders Vladi Sandler and Or Azarzar.

Lightspin was founded in 2020 by CEO Vladi Sandler and CTO Or Azarzar. The two are former white hat hackers who developed a context-based cloud security platform for cloud-native and Kubernetes environments. The platform provides a full contextual view of all cloud assets and relationships, maps the potential attack paths, and prioritizes and remediates the most critical security issues from build to runtime.

Cisco, which currently has a market cap of $206 billion, employs over 80,000 across the world, including 800 in six R&D sites in Israel. Cisco has acquired three other Israeli companies over the past three years. It paid around $500 million for cloud startup Epsagon in August 2021, $100 million for Sedona three months earlier, and also purchased Portshift, a Kubernetes-native security platform, in October 2020.