20 Startups To Watch In 2015
Check our list of security startups sure to start (or continue) making waves in the coming year.
December 29, 2014
Founded: 2011
What it does: "Data-defined" perimeter security
Latest funding: $21 million in Series C, August 2014
Noteworthy player: Tim Eades (CEO)
vArmour is another player meant to help the borderless enterprise with what it calls "data-defined" perimeter security. Like others in this space, it hopes to provide better visibility and control of data no matter where it resides.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Cloud security and governance
Latest funding: $40 million in Series C, June 2014
Meant to support the cloud adoption lifecycle, Skyhigh provides enterprises with the means to maintain governance and compliance objectives across cloud services with a platform that offers policy-based controls.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Web security
Latest funding: $40 million in Series C, February 2014
Noteworthy player: Shuman Ghosemajumder (VP of strategy)
Shape security hopes to reinvent web security by inverting the concept of code polymorphism and using it against malware. The idea is to using polymorphism in real-time on websites, so that sites are constantly rewriting their code while preserving web app functionality, making them moving targets to thwart attackers, who count on their usual static nature to pick them apart at will.
Founded: 2009
What it does: Pen testing products
Latest funding: $5.1 million in Series A, July 2013
Noteworthy player: Dave Porcello (founder & CEO)
Built around the grassroots success of its signature Pwn Plug device, Pwnie Express has been growing by leaps and bounds, offering penetration tester devices that make it easier to carry out the work.
Founded: 2010
What it does: Intrusion detection, anomaly detection
Noteworthy player: Steve Cheng (co-founder)
PFP Cybersecurity is built on technology that provides intrusion detection for SCADA, semiconductor, mobile, and network devices using measurement of the processor's power consumption and doing anomaly detection through trusted industry benchmarks.
Founded: 2012
What it does: Security training
Latest funding: $2.5 million in Series A, July 2012
Noteworthy player: Rohyt Belani (CEO & co-founder)
PhishMe built its business model around helping businesses address their No. 1 weakest link in security: their employees. Its training platform helps improve employee resilience toward spear phishing, malware, and drive-by attacks.
Founded: 2010
What it does: Threat intelligence
Latest funding: $10 million in Series A, December 2013
Noteworthy player: Sam Glines (CEO)
In a very short period of time, Norse has managed to establish itself as a major player in the threat intelligence game, offering up a rich repository of threat information through its network of sensors, honeypots, crawlers, and agents scattered around the world.
Founded: 2012
What it does:Cloud policy enforcement
Latest funding: $35 million in Series C, May 2014
Noteworthy player: Sanjay Beri (CEO)
Netskope helps businesses gain better visibility into user behavior and data storage trends across cloud applications through its deep cloud analytics. It also helps them enforce more detailed cloud app usage policies in real time.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Access control and policy management
Latest funding: $25.5 million in Series B, February 2014
Noteworthy player: Steve Abbott (CEO)
With a number of noteworthy investors and advisors like Phil Dunkelberger and Dr. Paul Judge, Ionic is led by PGP vet Steve Abbott. The firm has its sights set on helping organizations get better control over data traversing the various domains of the borderless enterprise through access control, intellectual property monitoring, encryption, and policy management, without the use of proxies or gateways or draconion limits on user behavior.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Threat detection
Latest funding: $10 million in Series B, February 2012
Formerly known as FileTrek, Interset went through a rebranding in 2014 as it tries to make waves with its threat detection and behavioral analytics platform. Like many of the startups on our list, it was recently recognized by the Security Innovation Network (SINET) as one of 2014's SINET 16 Innovator winners.
Founded: 2010
What it does: Identity and access management
Latest funding: $30 million in Series C, June 2014
Identity is powering the social and commercial Internet as we know it, and Forgerock is hoping to be at the forefront with its open-source Open Identity Stack platform. The company considers itself less of a security company and more of an identity relationship management company, but make no mistake that its IAM capabilities cross firmly over into the security world.
Founded: 2013
What it does: Threat intelligence
Noteworthy player: Dr. Paul Vixie (founder)
One of the pioneers in Internet and DNS technology, Dr. Paul Vixie is the thought leader behind this startup, which focuses on offering real-time passive DNS technology that provides contextual information for reputation and threat feeds. The idea is to help other vendors, researchers, and incident handlers reduce dreaded false positives to focus on actual threats being pinpointed by their threat feeds.
Founded: 2008
What it does: Security intelligence and analytics
Latest funding: $30 million in Series C, November 2014
Noteworthy player: Nathaniel Fick (CEO)
The innovators at Endgame were leveraging data science to solve security problems long before it became the new hotness. One of the more established players on this list, Endgame recently obtained a new $30 million infusion in VC money that will be put to use to expand its federal and commercial customer base.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Advanced threat protection
Latest funding: $15.5 million in Series B, October 2013
Noteworthy player: Ali Golshan (founder & advisor)
Cyphort focuses on helping enterprises deal with prioritization of advanced attacks against endpoint, network, and cloud assets. Its platform offers both detection and visibility, as well as containment and resolution of advanced attacks.
Founded: 2012
What it does: Advanced threat detection
Latest funding: $20 million in Series B, February 2014
Noteworthy player: Stuart McClure (CEO & President)
Using a machine-learning methodology that combs through files, applications, executables, services, drivers, libraries, and other important factors and crunching relevant data through a predictive modeling algorithm, Cylance hopes to take APT detection to the next level. Its key goal is to help enterprises solve the problem of "graylist" threats occupying the gap between the known good and known bad.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Threat intelligence and endpoint security
Latest funding: $30 million in Series B, September 2013
Noteworthy players: Dmitri Alperovitch (co-founder & CTO), George Kurtz (co-founder & CEO)
CrowdStrike delivers technology and services designed to help enterprises home in on advanced threats and targeted attacks. Its cloud-based platform is built around predictive security analytics that take adversary threat intelligence into account rather than focusing on signatures and the like.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Application security
Noteworthy players: Jeff Williams (co-founder & CTO), Dave Wichers (co-founder & COO)
Contrast Security was founded by the founders of OWASP. They started the company with the hope that they could help organizations improve application security with a faster, more transparent, automated application security platform.
Founded: 2011
What it does: Risk management ranking
Latest funding: $24 million in Series A, June 2013
Noteworthy players: Stephen Boyer (co-founder & CTO), Nagarjuna Venna (co-founder & COO)
Billing itself as the "FICO" ratings service of the security world, BitSight collects tons of security threat intelligence data to put together risk scoring of companies that can be used by organizations to evaluate potential acquisition targets, partners, and so on, based on how risky they appear to be.
Founded: 2014
What it does: Threat intelligence
Latest funding: $8 million in Series A, December 2014
Noteworthy player: Oren Falkowitz (founder and CEO)
Founded by three ex-NSA agents and other security pros from Disney and MIT, Area 1 focuses on identifying early-stage targeted attacks through behavioral analysis. One of the more nascent startups on our list, this company's roster of experts and its recent funding round makes it worth keeping on the radar.
2015 is shaping up to be another gangbusters year for security startups as industry players hope to help organizations deal with the most difficult problems in security and risk management. We've put together a list of some of the startups most likely to make waves in the coming year.
Our choices reflect players that have some experience under their belts, that have been wooed heavily by the VC community, that are building their customer bases with products or services that have moved beyond the vaporware stage, or that have founders with a proven pedigree in security.
Founded: 2012
What it does: Mobile data gateway
Latest funding: $3 million, May 2014
Noteworthy player: Eldar Tuvey (co-founder & CEO)
Wandera wants to help enterprises move beyond MDM with a gateway that enables BYOD without giving in to mobile anarchy. It sits between employee devices and the Internet to offer greater visibility and control over corporate mobile data, while detecting and blocking mobile threats.
Founded: 2012
What it does: Mobile data gateway
Latest funding: $3 million, May 2014
Noteworthy player: Eldar Tuvey (co-founder & CEO)
Wandera wants to help enterprises move beyond MDM with a gateway that enables BYOD without giving in to mobile anarchy. It sits between employee devices and the Internet to offer greater visibility and control over corporate mobile data, while detecting and blocking mobile threats.
Founded: 2011
What it does: "Data-defined" perimeter security
Latest funding: $21 million in Series C, August 2014
Noteworthy player: Tim Eades (CEO)
vArmour is another player meant to help the borderless enterprise with what it calls "data-defined" perimeter security. Like others in this space, it hopes to provide better visibility and control of data no matter where it resides.
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