Is SentinelOne’s $2.5 Billion Acquisition of Orca Security in Trouble?

Orca Security founders Avi Shua and Gil Geron (PR Pic)

SentinelOne, an Israeli cybersecurity firm, has been planning on taking over fellow Israeli cybersecurity company Orca Security for some time now, at a reported price of $2.5 billion. But now Calcalist is reporting that there may be some problems with the SentinelOne takeover bid that could end it entirely.

According to the report in Calcalist, the deal is in jeopardy because of a recent decline in the value of SentinelOne’s stock. The company’s stock has fallen by 30% since it hit a high of $71 per share in November.
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As any buy ought deal would have included SentinelOne stock in lieu of cash, so there obviously must have been a desire on the part of Orca for an increase in the amount of stock offered.
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Founded in 2019, Orca Security offers a cloud security innovation. The company provides cloud-wide, workload-deep security and compliance for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Orca boasts that it treats a client’s cloud as an, “interconnected web of assets, prioritizing risk based on the severity of the underlying security issue combined with environmental context, including its accessibility and potential damage to the business.” This does away with thousands of meaningless security alerts to provide just the critical few that matter, along with their precise path to remediation.

In October, Orca hit a $1.8 billion valuation after the company completed a $550 million Series C fundraise. And now it is expecting to get about 45% more than that in a sale.
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At the time, Avi Shua Co-founder and CEO of Orca, said, “We’re providing the worlds’ most comprehensive cloud security solution – detecting risks that normally would require half a dozen tools to handle. Most importantly, we don’t hand practitioners a list of a million ‘critical’ alerts and tell them to ‘go figure.’ Rather, Orca uses an innovative, graph-first contextual approach to prioritize the 0.1% of risks that really matter – freeing your security teams to spend their precious time on the truly critical attack vectors that can actually be exploited.