Darktrace vs Orca Security

By valuation, Darktrace is the larger company at $5.3B versus $1.8B — a 2.9x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Darktrace employs 1000-5000 people while Orca Security has 450 employees.

Orca Security has raised more in total funding at $640M, compared to Darktrace's $230M — a gap of $410M. Combined, the two companies have completed 7 known funding rounds.

Darktrace leads with an Awaira Score of 85/100, while Orca Security sits at 68/100. That 17-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Darktrace was founded by Poppy Gustafsson in 2013. Orca Security was founded by Avi Shua in 2019. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Darktrace: Darktrace is an AI cybersecurity company that applies unsupervised machine learning to detect and respond to cyber threats inside enterprise networks, email systems, cloud environments, and operational technology. The Cambridge-based company pioneered the concept of the enterprise immune system, training AI models on each organisation normal network behaviour to identify anomalies that indicate intrusion, insider threat, or ransomware activity in real time without requiring predefined threat signatures.\n\nThe company went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021, raising approximately $230 million in its IPO after backing from Invoke Capital, Vitruvian Partners, and KKR. Darktrace reports over 9,000 enterprise customers across more than 100 countries, including significant deployments in financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. The company has expanded from network detection to autonomous response capabilities through its Antigena product, which can quarantine infected systems and neutralise threats without human intervention.\n\nDarktrace competes in the AI-native cybersecurity market against CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Microsoft Defender, as well as against SIEM vendors including Splunk and IBM QRadar. The company valuation and public market performance have been volatile, reflecting broader uncertainty around AI cybersecurity spending cycles and questions about autonomous response effectiveness in complex enterprise environments. Its AI self-learning approach, applied consistently across network, email, cloud, and OT security, remains a distinctive architecture compared to detection-rule-based competitors, and the Poppy Gustafsson leadership profile has made Darktrace a flagship case study for UK technology entrepreneurship. Orca Security: Orca Security is a cloud security platform founded in 2019 that specializes in AI-driven vulnerability and misconfiguration detection across cloud environments. The company provides agentless security solutions that scan infrastructure, workloads, and data across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes deployments without requiring agent installation. Orca's core technology uses machine learning algorithms to identify risks including unpatched vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposed data, and compliance violations. The platform integrates with existing security tools and provides automated remediation recommendations. The company has secured $640 million in total funding at a $1.8 billion valuation as of its Series E funding round, reflecting significant investor confidence in cloud security solutions. Orca competes with vendors including Wiz, Lacework, and Snyk in the cloud security space. The company targets enterprise organizations managing complex multi-cloud infrastructures seeking consolidated visibility and risk assessment. Orca's agentless approach differentiates it by reducing deployment friction compared to agent-based competitors. The company has achieved notable enterprise adoption across financial services, technology, and healthcare sectors. Its growth trajectory reflects broader market demand for AI-enhanced cloud security tools as organizations accelerate cloud migration and face increasing sophistication in attack vectors targeting cloud infrastructure and data exposure risks. Orca Security's agentless scanning approach eliminates deployment friction while delivering AI-powered risk detection across multiple cloud platforms simultaneously.

Darktrace got there first, launching in 2013 — that's 6 years of extra runway. Orca Security didn't arrive until 2019. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Darktrace has about 1000-5000 employees; Orca Security has about 450. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Darktrace and Orca Security compete in AI Security, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.