10 Hot Cybersecurity Companies You Should Watch In 2024

These 10 companies across segments including email security, identity protection and security operations have been on our radar at CRN, thanks to their strong growth and channel investments.

Rising Names In Cybersecurity

With an estimated 3,000 cybersecurity companies in the market, just a few vendors have achieved the sort of name recognition that all companies aspire to. This select group includes cybersecurity companies such as Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Zscaler and SentinelOne — vendors whose product differentiation, strong growth and partner-friendly approaches have given them massive momentum with little sign of a slowdown anytime soon.

Then there are the fast-growing cybersecurity companies that are not quite in that league just yet, but aiming to join those ranks before long.

Out of the hundreds of cybersecurity companies that we’ve been following, we’ve identified 10 that fit this criteria — and whose top executives have spoken with us recently about what makes their approach to security stand out with customers and partners.

We chose these 10 hot cybersecurity companies because they’ve demonstrated major traction based upon achievements such as recent major funding rounds; significant product launches; acquisitions of notable startups; or other big moves. Each of these cybersecurity companies has also invested heavily into its work with the channel, showing a commitment to driving its business with the help of solution and service provider partners.

In other words, we think the following 10 cybersecurity companies should be on your radar, if they aren’t already. They operate in sectors of the cybersecurity market including email security, identity protection, cloud security, security operations, MDR (managed detection and response) and more.

What follows are our picks for 10 cybersecurity companies worth watching in 2024.

Abnormal Security

Abnormal Security has become a major force in email security thanks to its platform powered by behavioral AI technologies. The company’s technology can detect anomalous email activity across both the company level and user level, and is notable for how well it works with Microsoft 365, partners have told CRN. Notable updates to the Abnormal platform have included an expansion into securing the use of collaboration apps.

In August 2023, Abnormal Security disclosed that it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, and CTO Sanjay Jeyakumar (pictured) told CRN that going public is a goal down the road. “I think what we’re doing [currently] is kind of our first act,” Jeyakumar said, noting that an IPO will be a “milestone that is required in our journey” at some point.

In January, Abnormal Security hired longtime cybersecurity and channel industry executive Jonathan Corini as its new head of channel sales. “If you look at how Palo [Alto Networks] changed the industry of firewalls, and how CrowdStrike did that for endpoint — that's how I'm seeing Abnormal and email,” Corini told CRN.

Adlumin

Adlumin stands out by combining a number of capabilities that are often treated by vendors as separate offerings, including managed detection and response (MDR) and security information and event management (SIEM), according to Adlumin co-founder and CEO Robert Johnston (pictured). Adlumin has “consolidated SIEM and MDR into one streamlined platform,” he said in an interview with CRN. Rather than using separate offerings or vendors that don’t always sync up with each other, “those experiences live and breathe in one platform” with Adlumin, Johnston said.

In October 2023, Adlumin landed $70 million in Series B funding, with the aim of accelerating its expansion in the midmarket and SMB with the help of channel partners. Adlumin’s approach has been to provide an enterprise-caliber security operations platform for the midmarket, while also providing a 24x7 managed option that makes sense for even the smallest organizations, Johnston said.

Johnston served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps, heading several cyber teams including the Cyber National Mission Force, before leading incident response teams at the National Security Agency. He entered the private sector by joining cybersecurity heavyweight CrowdStrike as a principal consultant in 2015. The following year, Johnston led CrowdStrike’s high-profile investigation into the Democratic National Committee breach by Russian intelligence.

Aqua Security

Aqua Security specializes in securing the use of cloud-native technologies through its CNAPP (cloud native application protection platform), including with its robust agent that can enable remediation of cloud security issues. Aqua also has added agentless scanning tools including CSPM (cloud security posture management) for real-time visibility. In cloud security, “you can do some things without an agent,” Aqua Security co-founder and CEO Dror Davidoff recently told CRN. “But to really have a full solution, you must have an agent in place, and you want to be able to block bad things from happening in real time.” Ultimately, “you want to be able to react in a very immediate and decisive way if there is a problem,” Davidoff (pictured) said.

Recent product updates from Aqua Security have included the launch of a KBOM (Kubernetes Bill of Materials) to provide visibility into the components of a Kubernetes cluster. Meanwhile, in early January, Aqua Security announced raising a $60 million extension to its Series E funding round, at a valuation “above $1 billion.”

BlueVoyant

BlueVoyant, a managed detection and response firm focused on securing Microsoft environments, recently disclosed that it had grown at an 80-percent clip over the last year. In November, BlueVoyant announced the acquisition of Conquest Cyber, a firm specializing in providing cloud security to Microsoft customers in the government sector. BlueVoyant said the deal provides robust cybersecurity assessment and compliance capabilities, with an enhanced ability to identify gaps in the security posture of clients.

“This is a combination of two best-in-class security operators in the Microsoft universe,” BlueVoyant CEO Jim Rosenthal (pictured) told CRN. “In combination the two of us together will be bringing the Microsoft security stack to more state and local governments than anyone else.”

In connection with the deal, BlueVoyant also raised more than $140 million in Series E funding.

Cribl

Cribl offers a data platform that aims to enable improved flexibility and control around security and IT data. The company aims to serve as an “agnostic” data engine, with the ability to route data — including from Splunk — and then place that data into a data lake or take other security-focused actions with it, according to Cribl. “All through our product portfolio, what we stand for is choice and control, and giving people the ability that no matter where the data is coming from — no matter where the data is going to — we can route that data, we can process that data and really give them the ability to put that data wherever is the right place for that class of data,” CEO and Co-Founder Clint Sharp (pictured) told CRN.

In October 2023, Cribl disclosed it had surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, reaching the milestone in four years. Cribl said it became the fourth fastest company in the infrastructure space to do so (behind only Wiz, HashiCorp and Snowflake). Cribl is now eyeing an initial public offering “in the foreseeable future,” according to Sharp.

Illumio

Illumio’s zero-trust segmentation technology aims to isolate and contain an attacker following a breach, preventing the threat actor from getting any further even if they’re able to gain initial access to a device or system. The company has expanded from offering segmentation for on-premises data centers to also covering cloud, multi-cloud and hybrid environments, as well as adding segmentation for endpoints.

Recent moves have included the hire of veteran channel chief Todd Palmer (pictured) as Illumio’s senior vice president of global partner sales and alliances. Palmer told CRN that Illumio’s differentiated technology and strong commitment to partners helped to inspire the move to become channel chief at the company. For a role that entails building out a partner ecosystem within the cybersecurity space, “you want to make sure that you are [providing] innovative technologies at the forefront of these big movements,” he said.

Other major hires have included bringing on John Kindervag as chief evangelist. A former Forrester analyst, Kindervag coined the term “zero trust” and described the key principles of the concept in 2010.

Securonix

With the aim of accelerating its growth in the SIEM (security information and event management) market, Securonix last year unveiled its new platform, its Unified Defense SIEM. The platform works with data feeds from Snowflake’s data lake and better accommodates the massive volumes of security-relevant data that modern enterprises generate through a cloud-native approach, according to the vendor. The platform stands out be being able to leverage 365 days worth of “hot” searchable data from the Snowflake Data Cloud, the company said.

CEO Nayaki Nayyar (pictured) recently told CRN that her top priority in her first year was to solidify the company’s product offerings, which led to the release of the Unified Defense SIEM. Nayyar said the timing is now ideal for Securonix to ramp up its work with channel partners. “That’s going to be a big growth vector for us,” she said.

To drive the effort, Securonix recently hired Mark Stevens as channel chief from Ivanti, where he had previously worked with Nayyar, formerly the president of Ivanti. Overall at Securonix, “we have pretty big plans for where we want to take this entire partner program,” Nayyar said.

Semperis

Amid the surge in identity-based attacks, Semperis brings a focus on “identity resilience” and mitigation of threats including exploitation of passwords and other credentials. This is a crucial area in part because most customers now have hybrid IT environments, said Mickey Bresman (pictured), co-founder and CEO of Semperis. “The legacy approach of having an endpoint protection and firewall and so on gone,” Bresman told CRN. “That's why we believe that identity is the way to go.”

One challenge, however, is that most organizations have extended their Microsoft Active Directory identity system to include a cloud component — most frequently Microsoft Entra ID (formerly known as Azure Active Directory), or alternatively Okta or Ping Identity. As a result, Active Directory has become a massive breach target, with the vast majority of attacks now including some sort of Active Directory component, Bresman said.

Semperis aims to protect customers by offering security prior to attacks exploiting Active Directory (closing the gaps); during attacks (detection of a breach); and after attacks (enabling resiliency and the ability for organizations to quickly bounce back). The company has since expanded to also offer the same three layers of security for Entra ID.

Recent moves by the company have included appointing Chris Inglis, formerly the U.S. National Cyber Director, to its strategic advisory board, which also includes other members including General David Petraeus.

Snyk

Snyk has made a series of recent moves to expand its developer security platform, including with the acquisition in January of a startup that specializes in capturing security-relevant data from live applications. The addition of technology developed by the startup, Helios, will bolster Snyk’s capabilities around correlating code security scans with signals from runtime apps, the company said.

The acquisition follows Snyk’s recent launch of a major update to its application security posture management (ASPM) offering, AppRisk. The debut of Snyk’s AppRisk Essentials tool provides automatic discovery of app assets that are code-based as well as management of security coverage and prioritization based on risk, according to the company. The offering was driven by Snyk’s previous acquisition of ASPM startup Enso Security in June 2023.

In a recent interview, Snyk CEO Peter McKay (pictured) told CRN that the expansion into ASPM has helped the company deliver greater visibility to application security teams, not just developers. In the past, “we were really heavily weighted to the developer, very focused on that developer experience. In some cases, maybe we weren’t focused enough on the security side,” McKay said at the time. “They needed more from us, and that’s what Enso provided. So we were able to bring both of those together.”

McKay added that the moves are helping to enable Snyk to make a bigger push with channel partners than the company has previously. “The timing is right for us to invest more aggressively in the channel because they get it now,” he said. “They see this need to shift left and embed developer security.”

Last week, a report from The Information indicated that Snyk is continuing to work toward an initial public offering, with its IPO prospectus for investors likely to be filed with regulators within several months. Snyk said in a statement that it “never comments on market speculation or rumors.” McKay previously told CRN that the developer security platform vendor had already completed much of the groundwork for an IPO.

Torq

Security “hyperautomation” startup Torq offers a no-code method for automating SecOps activities. The platform boosts security analyst productivity by completing numerous Security Operations Center (SOC) tasks faster and more easily, according to the company.

In November, Torq disclosed it had reached a deal to provide its technology to managed detection and response vendor Deepwatch, as the three-year-old company looks to accelerate its displacement of existing technologies for automating security operations (SecOps), according to Torq co-founder and CTO Leonid Belkind (pictured). “It’s a significant step because [Deepwatch] is one of the market leaders and one of the bigger players in the market,” Belkind said in an interview. “To have them fully base their service on [Torq] as their infrastructure shows the level of maturity that we now have.”

In January, Torq announced that has added $42 million in new funding, bringing the company to a total of $120 million to date, amid surging revenue growth.