The 10 Hottest Cybersecurity Startups In 2022 (So Far)
Despite economic concerns, the funds keep flowing to promising young security firms.
Despite market upheavals and fears of a recession, investors continued to show their strong support for cybersecurity startups during the first half of 2022.
All types of cybersecurity startups are benefiting from the huge demand for security products to counter increasingly brazen cyberattacks and other malicious antics by hackers.
Exact funding numbers for the second quarter are not in yet, but the first quarter saw nearly $6 billion in cybersecurity funding, up 50 percent from the same quarter in 2021, according to Crunchbase.
There are signs of a cooling market, such as the fact that 1Q 2022 funding was significantly lower than 4Q 2021 funding, according to Crunchbase.
A number of investment players also note that venture valuations have been falling lately, due to the drying up of the IPO market and worrying signs of a possible economic downturn.
Still, there’s no denying it was a good funding spring for a lot of young cybersecurity startups.
The following are 10 of the hottest cybersecurity companies so far in 2022. Click through our slideshow to see the details of each startup.
The 10 Hottest Cybersecurity Startups In 2022:
* Mosyle
* Island
* Fortress Information Security
* Coro
Tailscale
CEO: Avery Pennarun
Founded in 2019, Tailscale announced this past spring that it had closed on a $100 million Series B funding round led by CRV and Insight Partners, allowing the Toronto-based security company to turbocharge its sales and to enhance its zero trust VPN offering.
Tailscale claims it’s already been on a tear of late, experiencing 1,200 percent year-over-year growth and 20 percent quarter-over-quarter growth. The firm is convinced the market is ready for less complicated and less centralized security offerings.
Mosyle
CEO and founder: Alcyr Araujo
In May, Mosyle, a mobile device management platform for Apple devices, announced it had closed on a $196 million Series B funding round along with launching its Apple Unified Platform, a solution that integrates five applications into one.
Mosyle’s platform combines enhanced device management, endpoint security, internet privacy/security, identity management and application management in one package.
“We are the only player offering this kind of solution,” Mosyle’s founder and chief executive officer, Alcyr Araujo, told CRN at the time.
Abnormal Security
CEO and co-founder: Evan Reiser
Abnormal Security had a good spring, raising $210 million in a Series C funding round, led by Insight Partners, with participation from Greylock Partners and Menlo Ventures. With its total funding now at $283 million, the San Francisco-based email security company was valued this spring at about $4 billon.
Founded in 2018, Abnormal Security has recently said that over the past year it has tripled its annual recurring revenue and doubled its employee headcount. Its clients include Xerox, Hitachi Vantara and Groupon.
Island
CEO: Mike Fey
Island is yet another cybersecurity startup to recently become a member of the billion-dollar valuation club, crossing that financial threshold earlier this year after landing $115 million in new Series B funding and only seven weeks after emerging from stealth mode.
The Dallas-based secure browser vendor is headed by former Symantec president and CEO Mike Fey, who started the company to provides better security controls and governance for corporate applications and data. “There was a major opportunity to rethink the browser,” Fey told CRN in February.
Talon Cyber Security
CEO and co-founder: Ofer Ben-Noon
Talon Cyber Security may not be a billion-dollar valuation startup – at least not yet. The Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity firm, founded last year, has raised about $43 million to date.
But if the reception Talon Cyber received at the recent RSA convention in San Francisco – where the firm won the coveted award for most innovative security startup in 2022 – is any indication of its future prospects, it could be only a matter of time before the firm approaches unicorn status.
The firm’s TalonWork browser gives customers the “deep security visibility and control over SaaS applications needed to simplify security for the future of work,” according to material provided by RSA in June.
Fortress Information Security
Executive chairman and co-founder: Peter Kassabov
Supply-chain security has been a hot subsector of cybersecurity ever since the infamous SolarWinds hack of late 2020 revealed just how vulnerable software supply chains are around the world. And at the cutting-edge of developing new supply-chain security tools is Fortress Information, an Orlando, Florida-based firm that earlier this spring landed $125 million in new funding led by funds managed by the private equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
“Supply chains represent a source of significant threats to the national economy and our ability to maintain our way of life,“ Peter Kassabov, executive chairman and co-founder of Fortress, said in a statement in April.
BlueVoyant
CEO: Jim Rosenthal
BlueVoyant caught a lot of people’s attention this past winter when it announced it had raised $250 million in a Series D funding round led by Liberty Strategic Capital, a private equity firm founded by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin.
The round’s valuation pushed the New York-based BlueVoyant, which sells security tools and managed services to enterprises, into unicorn valuation territory, though the firm isn’t releasing its exact $1 billion-plus valuation as a result of the new infusion of cash. The startup was founded in 2017.
Coro
CEO and co-founder: Guy Moskowitz
Can there ever be such a thing as an “all in one” cybersecurity platform that provides most of the protections that mid-sized companies need? Coro thinks so. And so do its investors, who earlier this spring ponied up $60 million in Series C funding, bringing the New York-based Coro’s total funds raised to $80 million.
Among the planned uses of the new funds: a “very aggressive” expansion of Coro’s channel team to help boost sales of its “all-in-one” cybersecurity product, as CRN reported in April.
Grip Security
CEO and co-founder: Lior Yaari
Grip Security was on CRN’s hot cybersecurity startups list a year ago after it raised $6 million in seed money. And it’s on our list again this year for approximately 19 million additional reasons, as in the $19 million it has since raised in a Series A round led by Intel Capital, with previous seed-round leader YL Ventures participating.
Founded in 2021, the Tel Aviv-based company’s offerings allow organizations to discover and secure all SaaS applications from any device and any location. Grip Security provides organizations with full visibility into their entire SaaS portfolio, as well as enforceable endpoint-centric access and data governance capabilities.
StackHawk
CEO: Joni Klippert
StackHawk is another cybersecurity startup that had a good spring, raising $20.7 million in Series B funding and bringing its total raised to $35 million since its founding in 2019. The company has said it plans to use the new funds to improve its application programming interface (API) security testing offerings.
Headed by CEO Joni Kippert, StackHawk also recently announced a partnership with cybersecurity vendor Snyk, providing new integrations between dynamic security testing and static security testing.