20 Cybersecurity Vendors Getting Venture Capital Love
VCs splashed a record $4B in funding in the cybersecurity pool - here are some highlights among the early- to middle-stage startups who snagged big deals last year.
January 9, 2018
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2017 was a record-smashing year for venture capital funding of cybersecurity startups. According to figures from CBInsights, the year ended with 248 deals totaling $4.06B. A lot of that high funding valuation came on the backs of mega late stage funding for the likes of well-known firms like Crowdstrike, Cybereason, and Exabeam. But there was plenty of cash splashed around for relative newcomers and upstarts, which is where we'll focus on this year's list.
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. Our selection criteria this time around was for companies that managed to land a deal for $15 million or more in Series C or earlier funding in 2017.
In the interest of highlighting new firms, we've included only companies that were not already featured in our startup lists in the last two years. 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 here are notable for their leadership by security veterans and visionaries. Like the last several years, we've noted these factors.
Biometric and OTP authentication
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $40M Self-Funded (January)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO Mickey Boodaei was a co-founder of Imperva and together with president Rakesh K. Loonkar, also co-founded Trusteer, which was eventually picked up by IBM in 2014. Last year the pair plowed $40M of their own dollars into a funding round for Transmit.
Third-party risk management platform
Factors To Watch: $55M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2016
2017 Funding: $20M Series B (April)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CyberGRX helps collect third-party risk information with a clearinghouse model, where audits are collected once about an organization and then disseminated to all of its future partners.
Cross-platform document and data protection
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $15M Series C (May)
Notes: Vera most notably just announced a relationship that will have its technology protecting all of GE's intellectual property across a wide range of cloud services and document types.
Threat protection and visibility for Web apps, microservices, and APIs
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $15M Series B (May)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Founded by a trio of security execs formerly out of the Etsy security team - Andrew Peterson, Nick Galbreath, and Zane Lackey - Signal Sciences is aimed squarely at the DevSecOps market.
Agentless IoT device visibility and control
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2015
2017 Funding: $17M Series A (June)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founder and CTO Nadir Izrael is a veteran of the Israeli army's Unit 8200 - a frequent trait among many founders in cybersecurity startup land.
AI-backed security analytics for cloud and IoT
Factors To Watch: $21M+ funding round in 2017; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2013
2017 Funding: $32.5M Series B (June)
Notes: CBilling itself as a "cognitive security analytics company," this firm leans heavily on machine learning and AI to bring security to IoT and cloud applications.
Business risk intelligence using data from the Deep and Dark Web
Factors To Watch: $25M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2010
2017 Funding: $28M Series C (July)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO Josh Lefkowitz brings to the table a good mix of experience consulting for the FBI and working within the top-tier financial world. His team of executives includes Evan Kohlmann and Laith Alkhouri, both of whom have many years of experience in anti-terrorist and national security operations.
Zero-day and APT endpoint protection
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $32M Series B (July)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CTO and co-founder Dr. Eli David is well known in the academic community for his work in the field of neural networks, computational intelligence, and evolutionary computing.
Autonomous endpoint protection
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2017
2017 Funding: $50M Series A (July)
2017 Funding: $30M Series B (September)
Notes: AppGuard technology was developed by Blue Ridge Networks and acquired by Japanese firm Blue Planetworks, which formed AppGuard as a wholly owned subsidiary.
Intelligence-driven authentication
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2012
2017 Funding: $35M Series A (July)
Notable Leaders/Founders: CEO and co-founder Dr. Zia Hayat has over 15 years of cybersecurity experience in the consulting world and as a security architect in the top-tier financial world.
SOC investigation and forensics automation
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $31M Series B (July)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founder and security researcher Gary Golomb has years of security research experience under his belt, including stints at Cylance, NetWitness, and Enterasys Networks.
Next-gen endpoint protection
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2013
2017 Funding: $21M Series B (July)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founder and CTO Nir Gaist is a longtime Israeli security consultant with experience servicing organizations like the Israeli Police, Israeli parliament, and Microsoft's Israel branch.
Data analytics through natural language processing
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2015
2017 Funding: $15.8M Series A (July)
Notes: Insight Engine has its sights on a broader market, but for now its flagship product is a cybersecurity investigation platform for Splunk.
Global Internet monitoring platform
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2012
2017 Funding: $40M Series B (August)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founders Matt Kraning, Tim Junio, and Shaun Maguire are a trio with some heavy-hitting experience doing cybersecurity research both at DARPA and Stanford.
Threat detection and security for IoT
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $27M Series B (September)
Notable Leaders/Founders: A 25-year veteran of the cybersecurity world, founder Chris Rouland previously founded and grew Endgame into a $10M business in just three years. He also served as CTO of Internet Security Systems (ISS) back in the day, becoming an IBM Distinguished engineer after Big Blue picked up ISS.
Container security and compliance
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2015
2017 Funding: $25M Series B (September)
Notes: Aqua is targeted firmly at the enterprise DevSecOps movement, providing visibility and controls for the containerized environments that the next generation of development requires.
Behavioral analytics for insider threat and APT detection
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2008
2017 Funding: $29M Series A (September)
Notes: Though this firm is 10 years old this year, it just started going after venture funding recently and plans to use that to jump-start global growth.
Third-party security risk scoring
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2013
2017 Funding: $27.5M Series C (October)
Notable Leaders/Founders: A longtime security vet and former CISO, CEO Aleksandr Yampolskiy has worked in numerous security roles for organizations like Goldman Sachs, Oracle, and Microsoft.
Threat detection and analysis
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; All-Star Security Executives
Founded: 2013
2017 Funding: $25M Series A (November)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Co-founders Mario Vuksan and Tomislav Pericin are well-known security researchers who have made the rounds at Black Hat with lots of acclaimed research using their reverse-engineering tools and techniques developed over the years.
IoT Security
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $22M Series B (November)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Zingbox's platform is designed to detect anomalous activity across an enterprise's IoT footprint. It'll use funding it closed on in the fall to increase headcount and accelerate delivery on its feature roadmap.
IoT Security
Factors To Watch: $15M+ funding round in 2017; Recent Funding; Newcomer to hot niche
Founded: 2014
2017 Funding: $22M Series B (November)
Notable Leaders/Founders: Zingbox's platform is designed to detect anomalous activity across an enterprise's IoT footprint. It'll use funding it closed on in the fall to increase headcount and accelerate delivery on its feature roadmap.
2017 was a record-smashing year for venture capital funding of cybersecurity startups. According to figures from CBInsights, the year ended with 248 deals totaling $4.06B. A lot of that high funding valuation came on the backs of mega late stage funding for the likes of well-known firms like Crowdstrike, Cybereason, and Exabeam. But there was plenty of cash splashed around for relative newcomers and upstarts, which is where we'll focus on this year's list.
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. Our selection criteria this time around was for companies that managed to land a deal for $15 million or more in Series C or earlier funding in 2017.
In the interest of highlighting new firms, we've included only companies that were not already featured in our startup lists in the last two years. 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 here are notable for their leadership by security veterans and visionaries. Like the last several years, we've noted these factors.
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