In spite of a slowdown in the overall funding activity from venture capital firms in 2016, the cybersecurity market continued to raise money at full steam. Last year saw the market break records in terms of funding deals, with Q3 tallying up to be the most active quarter for deals in cybersecurity in the last five years, according to CBInsights.
That influx of money is driving innovation in a number of areas. Particularly notable market segments targeted by these firms include security for data centers and public cloud infrastructure, security orchestration and incident response tools, and third-party risk assessment tools.
The following 20 firms are primarily early- to middle-stage startups, with a few more mature start-ups that have courted growth equity to change course or expand into a particularly hot new market segment. We believe these firms are worth watching due to several factors. On the funding front, they either managed to snag $25 million or more in funding in 2016, or garnered a notable funding round within the last three months. Many of these firms have been founded in the past three years and a number of them are notable for acting as first-movers in a particularly hot security niche. Additionally, a number of the firms are notable for their leadership by security veterans and visionaries.
In the interest of bringing some new blood to our annual spotlight on startups, we've included only companies that were not already featured in our lists in the last two years.
Bitglass
Cloud access security broker (CASB)
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2013
2017 Funding: $45M Series C (January)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO Nat Kausik is a serial entrepreneur and Silicon Valley veteran who has started companies across a number of enterprise IT markets, including payment and authentication firm Arcot Systems.
Bromium
A micro-virtualization solution for protecting enterprise desktops from advanced malware attacks
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2010
2015 Funding: $40M Series D (March)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founder and CTO Simon Crosby previously founded XenSource and stuck around to serve as CTO of the Virtualization and Management Division of Citrix after it acquired XenSource.
Cyence
Cyber risk modeling platform for the insurance industry to quantify risk
Factors To Watch: Newcomer to hot niche; $25M+ funding round in 2016; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2014
2016 Funding: $40M Series A (September)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CTO and co-founder George Ng has got a rich history in dual tracks of data science and cybersecurity. He's got a PhD in applied mathematics and statistics and has served stints at DARPA, US CERT and DHS.
Darktrace
An "Enterprise Immune System:" adaptive, self-learning platform for anomaly detection
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016
Founded: 2013
2016 Funding: $64M Series C (July)
Demisto
Security operations platform utilizing ChatOps for more effective information sharing and collaboration
Factors To Watch: Newcomer to hot niche; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2015
2016 Funding: $6M (May)
2017 Funding: $20M (February)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO and co-founder Slavik Markovich previously founded database security firm Sentrigo, which was acquired by McAfee in 2011.
Druva
Cloud platform for data availability and data governance across cloud services
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016
Founded: 2008
2016 Funding: $51M Series E (September)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founders Jaspreet Singh, Milind Borate and Ramani Kothandaraman are all engineering alumni of Veritas Software.
Evident.io
Security and compliance monitoring for AWS and public cloud IaaS and PaaS infrastructure
Factors To Watch: Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executive(s)
Founded: 2013
2016 Funding: $15.7M Series B (April)
2017 Funding: $22M Series C (February)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO and founder Tim Prendergast was a key player at Adobe who supported the company's effort to shift its core desktop products to a cloud-delivered SaaS model.
Fugue
A cloud operating system for enforcing cloud infrastructure policy; allows users to easily build, enforce, replicate and terminate cloud workloads.
Factors To Watch: Newcomer to hot niche; $25M+ funding round in 2016; Recent Funding
Founded: 2012
2016 Funding: $20M Series C (January)
2017 Funding: $41M Series D (January)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO and co-founder Josh Stella previously worked as a principal solutions architect for Amazon Web Services.
IntSights
Cyber attack detection and response platform.
Factors To Watch: Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2015
2016 Funding: $7.5M Series A (August)
2017 Funding: $15M Series B (February)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Two co-founders, CTO Gal Ben David and CPO Alon Arvatz, previously served as cybersecurity researchers for the Israel Defence Force (IDF).
Kenna
Risk intelligence and vulnerability platform for prioritizing and remediating vulnerabilities
Factors To Watch: Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2011
2016 Funding: $15M Series B (December)
Notable Leaders/Founders: A longtime cybersecurity veteran, CTO and co-founder Ed Bellis previously served as CISO at Orbitz.
LogicMonitor
SaaS-based data center monitoring services for physical, virtual and cloud-based IT infrastructure
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016
Founded: 2008
2016 Funding: $130M Private Equity (June)
NEXThink
IT analytics and intelligence platform, including SIEM and SOC management
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016
Founded: 2014
2016 Funding: $40M Series E (April)
PerimeterX
Behavioral-based web protection from automated/non-human attacks
Factors To Watch: Newcomer to hot niche; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2014
2016 Funding: $12M Series A (April)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founder and CTO Ido Safruti is a product of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Talpiot training program.
Phantom
Security automation and orchestration platform for incident response triage and resolution
Factors To Watch: Newcomer to hot niche; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $13.5M Series B (January)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO and co-founder Oliver Friedrichs is a serial cybersecurity entrepreneur. Most recently he founded Immunet, which was acquired by Sourcefire in 2011. He's also the co-founder of Security-Focus, which was acquired by Symantec, and early in his career developed a prototype of the industry's first commercial penetration testing product.
Prevalent
Third-party risk management, including automated vendor risk assessment and continuous vendor threat monitoring
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016
Founded: 2004
2016 Funding: $60M Series C (November)
RiskIQ
Digital risk monitoring technology for detecting online threats to a brand's customers
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2009
2016 Funding: $30.5M Series C (November)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO and co-founder Elias Manousos serves as co-chair of the Online Trust Alliance Anti-Malvertising Working Group and served as vice president of R&D at Securant Technologies, which was acquired by RSA.
Silent Circle
Secure communications through encrypted text, e-mail, mobile phone and video teleconferencing services
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2012
2016 Funding: $50M Series C (July)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founders Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas are luminaries in the cryptography world. Zimmermann wrote Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption in the '90s and together with Callas they founded PGP Corporation.
StackPath
Security web services platform including secure content delivery network and web application firewall capabilities
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016
Founded: 2015
2016 Funding: $180M Private Equity (July)
Skybox Security
Security analytics and intelligence platform
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2002
2016 Funding: $96M Private Equity (February)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Eran Reshef is a serial entrepreneur in the cybersecurity space, previously founding Blue Security and Sanctum, a web application security firm acquired by IBM.
360 Mobile Security
Mobile security and performance applications, including antivirus, memory usage optimization and device cleaning software.
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2016
2016 Funding: $100M (February)
Ericka Chickowski specializes in coverage of information technology and business innovation. She has focused on information security for the better part of a decade and regularly writes about the security industry as a contributor to Dark Reading. View Full Bio
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