The 10 Hottest Cybersecurity Startups Of 2021 (So Far)

The 10 hottest cybersecurity startups include companies thwarting vulnerabilities early in the development life cycle, protecting SaaS applications regardless of device or location, and managing and securing identities, access and privileges.

Knowing What’s Around The Corner

Some of cybersecurity’s best and brightest have in recent years formed companies to address everything from protecting a distributed workforce to assessing and mitigating enterprise cyber-risk to securing the DevOps pipeline and getting visibility into an organization’s infrastructure.

CRN has identified 10 cybersecurity startups founded since 2019 with at least $6 million in outside funding that stood apart from the pack thanks to new funding, the launch of partner initiatives, or key product enhancements or updates. Five of the top startups are based in Israel, two are based in New York, two are based in California, and one is based in Florida.

These companies are solving security challenges such as thwarting vulnerabilities early in the development life cycle, protecting SaaS applications regardless of device or location, and managing and securing identities, access and privileges. Here’s a look at how the 10 coolest cybersecurity startups have made themselves relevant to partners and customers alike.

For more of the biggest startups, products and news stories of 2021 so far, click here.

Anvilogic

CEO: Karthic Kannan

Anvilogic was founded in 2019 and in May closed a $10 million Series A round led by Cervin Ventures to deliver AI-driven insight and recommendations that measure and improve threat detection coverage. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company employs 30 people today, up from just 15 employees a year ago, according to LinkedIn.

The Anvilogic security detection automation platform gives security teams a unified and normalized security operations process across their data platforms and security operations silos to gain insight and quickly take action. The company’s technology keeps up with evolving attack surfaces, measurably reducing risk and helping to accelerate business growth while reducing the overall cost to the Security Operations Center.

The company’s maturity scoring metric continuously measures, monitors and controls the SOC‘s state of preparedness. And Anvilogic said its enriched, kill-chain-oriented, visual threat hunting and triage automation capabilities are integrated into the detection workflow through open APIs with downstream security products for automated response action.

Authomize

CEO: Dotan Bar Noy

Authomize was founded in 2019 and in May closed a $16 million Series A round led by Innovation Endeavors to accelerate delivery of the company’s identity and security management platform and boost growth across product development and go to market, including the expansion of its partner network. The Tel Aviv-based company employs 31 people today, up from 21 employees a year ago.

The company said its platform allows teams to automatically detect and remediate identity and access management (IAM) risks across any environment by enabling teams to define and enforce the right level of permissions. The Authomize platform provides continuous risk analysis along with actionable insight to minimize security risks, reduce IT overload and ensure compliance, the company said.

Authomize in February integrated with Microsoft Graph API to help evaluate its customers’ organizational structure and the authorization details of various products and resources in the cloud. Through this collaborative API, the customer’s role assignments, group security settings, Microsoft SharePoint sites, Microsoft OneDrive files access details, calendar sharing information and applications are available.

BluBracket

CEO: Prakash Linga

BluBracket was founded in 2019 and in May closed a $12 million Series A round led by Evolution Equity Partners to expand its product functionality in key areas such as Infrastructure as Code security, CI/CD integration and keeping sensitive information out of code early in the development process. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company employs 18 people today, according to LinkedIn.

The company generates a proprietary risk score so security teams can understand risk quickly to prioritize resources for remediation. Through machine learning, BluBracket drastically reduces false positives that are common with other application security tools, resulting in code security that respects developer productivity and innovation.

BluBracket helps customers understand risk levels based on who has access to code, keeps a chain of custody for important code and alerts users based on anomalies. The company protects valuable IP by preventing and finding code that has leaked outside the enterprise into the public domain and continuously monitors Infrastructure as Code to find and fix cloud and Kubernetes misconfigurations.

Cycode

CEO: Lior Levy

Cycode was founded in 2019 and in May closed a $20 million Series A round led by Insight Partners to help secure enterprise DevOps tools such as source control management systems and build systems, registries and cloud infrastructure. The Tel Aviv-based company employs 36 people, up from 22 employees a year ago, according to LinkedIn.

The company’s technology addresses multiple layers of security, including access and authorization, security configurations, compliance and scanning engines. This enables customers to identify code tampering, code leakage, hard-coded secrets, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) misconfigurations and excess privileges from a single platform.

Cycode in May launched its knowledge graph to collect asset information and user activity from DevOps tools, infrastructure and security scanners. By correlating events across the software development life cycle, Cycode said its knowledge graph creates contextual insight, helps prioritize remediation, reduces false positives and ensures the integrity of the pipeline to prevent code-tampering incidents.

DoControl

CEO: Adam Gavish

DoControl was founded in 2020 and in April closed a $10 million Series A round led by RTP Global to help the company execute its go-to-market strategy by doubling its head count across research and development, sales and marketing. The New York-based company employs 24 people, according to LinkedIn.

The company said it helps enterprises prevent data breaches on SaaS applications while minimizing or eliminating the impact on business enablement. The DoControl platform offers comprehensive asset management to provide critical business insight across users, external collaborators, assets and third-party domains.

DoControl’s security policy enforcement prevents data breaches at scale through the consistent application of intuitive, no-code workflows. And the company’s Slack/Teams bot engages with end users on behalf of security or IT teams to enable a self-service remediation path for human errors, malicious activity and data leakage.

Grip Security

CEO: Lior Yaari

Grip Security was founded in 2021 and in April closed a $6 million seed funding round led by YL Ventures to enable organizations to discover and secure all SaaS applications from any device and any location. The Tel Aviv-based company employs 20 people, according to LinkedIn.

The company provides organizations with full visibility into their entire SaaS portfolio—known and unknown—as well as enforceable endpoint-centric access and data governance capabilities. Armed with deep visibility, Grip said its approach secures all SaaS application access regardless of device or location as well as maps data flows to apply security policies, including data loss prevention.

The Grip Security platform’s key capabilities include comprehensive SaaS application coverage, historical visibility into SaaS application usage and insight into risk levels posed by SaaS applications. The company can also apply security policies across any application or device as well as conduct deep cross-organizational analysis of applications, users and activity, according to Grip.

Lumu Technologies

CEO: Ricardo Villadiego

Lumu Technologies was founded in 2019 and in March closed a $7.5 million Series A round led by Panoramic Ventures and the SB Opportunity Fund to fuel sales and marketing initiatives as well as additional research and development. The Doral, Fla.-based company employs 48 people, up from 28 employees a year ago, according to LinkedIn.

The company’s cloud-based technology collects and standardizes metadata from across the network, including DNS queries, network flows, access logs from perimeter proxies and/or firewalls, as well as spam box filters. It then applies artificial intelligence to correlate threat intelligence from these disparate data sources and isolate confirmed points of compromise.

Lumu said it has built a powerful closed-loop, self-learning offering that helps security teams accelerate compromise detection, gain real-time visibility across their infrastructure and reduce the breach detection gap from months to minutes. Since February 2020, the company said it has analyzed more than 55 billion metadata records and detected more than 11 million adversarial contacts.

nSure.ai

CEO: Alex Zeltcer

nSure.ai was founded in 2019 and in June closed a $6.8 million Series A round led by DisruptiveAI, Phoenix Insurance, Kamet and Moneta Seeds to further develop the company’s predictive AI and machine learning algorithms that have reimagined digital fraud detection. The Tel Aviv-based company employs 16 people, according to LinkedIn.

The company’s fraud protection offering is made for sellers of digital goods that are attractive to fraudsters such as gift cards, digital wallets and banking services, airline tickets, software and games. nSure.ai’s 98 percent approval rate reflects a more accurate fraud-detection strategy, allowing retailers to recapture nearly $100 billion a year in revenue that peers lose by declining legitimate customers.

Sellers of physical goods have access to incumbent anti-fraud technologies that prevent fraudulent charges and come with chargeback guarantees. Now, nSure.ai said it is bringing this technological and chargeback guarantee revolution to the digital goods sector, freeing digital goods retailers of worry and opening greater opportunities to scale.

Talon Cyber Security

CEO: Ofer Ben-Noon

Talon Cyber Security was founded in 2021 and in April closed a $26 million seed funding round led by Team8 and Lightspeed Venture Partners to allow the company to further develop its technology and expand the development team. The Tel Aviv-based company employs 12 people, according to LinkedIn.

The company said it is developing a first-of-its-kind cybersecurity technology that protects against unique threats emerging in today’s era of distributed work. Talon’s technology makes it possible to turn an organization’s security weaknesses into resilience against cyberattacks without compromising an employee’s privacy or productivity, according to the company.

Talon’s novel approach enables all employees, no matter the device they are using, to access their corporate resources in a secure way. By enabling workforce productivity and flexibility while safeguarding security, Talon said it allows organizations to operate and innovate with confidence.

VisibleRisk

CEO: Derek Vadala

VisibleRisk was founded in 2019 as a joint venture between Moody’s and Team8 and in May received a $25 million investment from its two backers to help develop a global standard for assessing corporate cyber-risk. The New York-based company employs 41 people, up from just 13 employees a year ago, according to LinkedIn.

The company’s new Cyber Ratings product is based on cyber-risk quantification, which allows companies to benchmark their cyber-risks against those of their peers, and to better understand and manage the impact of cyberthreats to their businesses. The rating incorporates a holistic, validated set of internal and external factors affecting a company’s security posture and quantifies those risks in economic terms.

Vr Ratings are enhanced by real-time monitoring, custom reporting and expert analysis, and the company offers full transparency into the factors that determine a Cyber Rating, including the methodology and data sources. The company said its cyber-risk rating and real-time monitoring platform enables customers globally to continuously monitor and manage cyber risk as they would financial risk.