More consolidation is playing out in the security industry as platform players scoop up technology to give them deeper expertise in growing business areas. Thursday, Armis, a $4.2 billion specialist in cyber exposure management, said it would be acquiring Otorio, a specialist in securing industrial and physical environments.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed but sources close to the transaction tell TechCrunch that Armis — San Francisco-based but with roots out of Israel — is paying $120 million in cash and shares for Otorio. Previously, the Tel Aviv-based startup had raised $50 million from one strategic investor, the industrial firm Andritz, according to PitchBook data.
Otorio’s flagship product is called Titan, and it will be getting integrated into Armis’ Centrix platform. Up to now, Armis’ main focus has been on cloud services and identifying and managing risks across that attack surface. As one example of the kind of work that it does: it hit the headlines earlier this year when it said that its clients were blocking DeepSeek, the new AI model out of China, and then proceeded to publish research explaining why.
Otorio’s tech will complement that with a focus on an area that is sometimes overlooked — industrial machinery and wider industrial environments. These environments are often thought of as populated with “dumb” physical equipment. But machines are gradually getting replaced with more connected models, and when they do, they become equally vulnerable — perhaps more when you consider the critical nature of some industrial infrastructure.
The tech is also very useful for extending Armis’s overall work in other physical environments that are non-industrial but are “super secure,” in the words of CEO and co-founder Yevgeny Dibrov, and thus require on-premises security solutions.
“We are adding a few very strong components to our platform to address more environments, especially air gap environments that require on-premise deployments versus our SasS product, and also to really address zero-trust needs and capabilities,” he said. “Otorio is really helping us take it to the next level for this environment.”
For Otorio, the acquisition is an opportunity to scale up and out in a way that it would have been more challenged to do as a standalone startup.
“Armis has rapidly become the leading provider of cyber exposure management and has built a best in industry cloud SaaS platform that provides unmatched visibility, security, and risk management to enterprises across all industries,” said Daniel Bren, CEO and co-founder of OTORIO, in a statement. “I am thrilled for our team to be joining Armis at this time and to leverage our deep domain operational context.”
The last decade has been a big one for early-stage cybersecurity companies: fuelled by an ever-growing threat landscape, hundreds of companies have launched fuelled by millions in funding from VCs spotting the business opportunity to innovate in an ever-evolving field. But more recently, there are indications that late-stage companies are getting the bulk of the money out there. That makes the M&A option a more obvious one for a lot of smaller startups.
While companies like Wiz have raised billions to fuel its acquisition mission, others like Armis are also in the frame as buyers. Otorio is Armis’ third acquisition, as well as its third in the space of a year. (It acquired Silk Security for $150 million in April 2024, and CTCI for $20 million in February 2024 for $20 million.)
