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WELCOME TO THE cyber 60
At Lightspeed, we’ve been investing in enterprise founders for over 25 years. Today, cybersecurity investing is one of the pillars of our global enterprise practice, and a focus area of deep immersion and commitment.
Lightspeed has partnered with FORTUNE to release the first ever Cyber 60 report, a new annual listing of the top venture-backed companies in cybersecurity.
Lightspeed is also releasing the enclosed CISO Survey, identifying top priorities for the year ahead. We asked over 200 CISOs to share their experiences and plans in order to highlight areas of opportunity for startups in the marketplace.
The survey results point to eight key areas of opportunity and growth for startups to conquer: IAM, Cloud Infrastructure, Application Security, Data Security, Zero Trust, Insurance/Resilience, AI for Security, and Security for AI.
Lightspeed is proud to build with several of the companies in this report, and to congratulate all the companies recognized in the 2024 Cyber 60 for their contributions to cybersecurity around the world.
This is a Generational opportunity to build in cyberSecurity.
Guru Chahal
Lightspeed partner. Enterprise.
AI IS A CYBER ACCELERANT
Although AI tools have been deployed in cybersecurity solutions for years, the rise of transformer-based models has opened up new vectors for cyber attacks. For vendors, new opportunities exist to defend AI-based applications and deploy generative AI.
AI is both a security challenge, and a tool that can help CISOs win.
99% of IT and security leaders experienced at least one attack in 2022, according to Rubrik’s State of Data Security report. Attackers target the infrastructure that underpins commerce, government, utilities, defense, blockchain, AI – the OS of the world. Many attacks are instantly defeated – but what about the ones that get through?
The average cost of a cyber breach in 2022 was estimated to be $4.35 million. Last year, over
$10 BILLION was stolen by cyber criminals in the US alone, a 32% increase in just one year.
The vendors a CISO selects are their best and last line of defense to protect against hackers. Lightspeed is proud to partner with FORTUNE in identifying the 60 most promising cybersecurity startups in the market today.
Lightspeed is also pleased to share the results of our accompanying CISO survey, identifying eight areas of opportunity for founders who want to build in this space.
The global economic cost of cyber crime is estimated to reach $10.5 trillion by 2025.
CYBERSECURITY VENTURES
LIGHTSPEED PERSPECTIVES
Lightspeed is bullish on cybersecurity. We are in the early days of the fight to defend the global technology infrastructure from bad actors. As more and more of our world comes online, underpinned by complex systems and AI, the need for innovative and robust cyber solutions that defend and mitigate threats will grow exponentially in the years ahead.
From our research, conversations with industry experts and experiences of the Founders and companies that we are building with, we’ve determined the cybersecurity landscape is growing in a three-pronged manner:
consolidation has opened up an opportunity for a new set of differentiated, ai-first solutions that will become the platforms of the future.
Arif Janmohamed
Lightspeed partner. Enterprise.
1. Security spending is outpacing overall IT spend, and still accelerating
- Gartner projects an 11% CAGR for Information Security between now and 2027, writing that “growth for cybersecurity remains meaningfully above that of overall IT.”
2. consolidation has created A new market opportunity for emergent innovation
- Most CISOs have recently concluded platform consolidation projects, according to new research in this report.
- Cybersecurity consolidation presents an opportunity for nimble startups tackling emergent issues to fill in the gaps.
3. AI and Cloud Have Made Defending systems from attack more complex than ever
- The rise of new technologies including AI, increases attack vectors exponentially.
- Migration to cloud of mission critical applications and data increases surface area for attackers.
- Attacks from from state-sponsored hackers have increased in frequency and sophistication.
- The permanent rise of the distributed enterprise is a new normal.
CISO SURVEY
NOW IS THE TIME FOR CYBER FOUNDERS
Founders building cybersecurity startups have a massive opportunity to address in the market:
The AI Explosion has
CREATED A NEW SET OF
HEADACHES:
- Expanded attack vectors
- Increased novelty of attacks
- Accelerated evolution of attacks
- Enhanced responses and defenses
Traditional attack vectors are still active and require an evolving security stance
- Platform vendors must stay ahead of attackers to retain and grow market share
- Growth will come as part of the push towards vendor consolidation
Budgets are stable and expected to grow
- Gartner predicts an 11% CAGR between 2023-2027 across information security, adding nearly $100 billion of value
cagr FORECAST AS OF SEP 2023 ($ millions)
2023 - 2027
- $300 thousand
- 277
- 257
- 237
- 217
- 197
- 177
-
13.4%
-
12.5%
-
10.8%
-
9.5%
-
8.8%
Transition to cloud increases complexity
- Moving “mission critical” workloads to cloud is only just starting, indicating robust growth ahead in cloud security
SIZING CLOUD SHIFT, WORLDWIDE, 2019-2025 (total revenue)
SOURCE: GARTNER
-
705
304
-
710
370
-
744
451
-
775
544
-
805
655
-
838
779
-
868
917
- 2019
- '20
- '21
- '22
- '23
- '24
- '25
CISO SURVEY
Ciso Survey: TOP PRIORITIES IN CYBERSECURITY
Lightspeed surveyed over 200 CISOs to understand trends in the market, areas of growth and opportunity, and the transformative impact of technologies like cloud and AI.
The future of cybersecurity is full of opportunity and a haven for innovation. Founders have a generational opportunity to build startups that will make a lasting impact.
Security spending is robust and accelerating
CISOs Have CONSOLIDATED PLATFORMS – Now They Need INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS
The surface area for threats is growing rapidly thanks to AI
CISO SURVEY
Cybersecurity is the top priority for enterprise tech spending
In a recent Gartner study, 66% of executives said their organizations were increasing cyber/information security investments year over year.
In our CISO survey, 83% of respondents said cyber budgets were up year over year, despite changing macroeconomic conditions and other headwinds.
CISO SURVEY
CONSOLIDATION USHERS IN A NEW Wave of INNOVATION
For many CISOs, the most pressing mission of the COVID era was enhancing security through vendor consolidation.
SASE and XDR architectures powered the consolidation era – and their effectiveness has unlocked enterprise budgets for innovative new solutions focused on rapidly emerging threats, such as those powered by AI.
73% of respondents in our survey have moved their cybersecurity operations to platform-based solutions.
According to Gartner, by the end of 2023:
-
> 80%
will have completed XDR projects
-
~ 70%
will have completed SASE projects
-
89%
want their SASE and XDR technologies to work together
CONSOLIDATION BY THE NUMBERS
-
70%
of CISOs we surveyed are using 10 or more cybersecurity products or services in their enterprise.
-
68%
of CISOs we surveyed cite consolidation, cost, or future proofing as the most important factors when choosing to add or remove a cybersecurity vendor from their technology stack
CISO SURVEY
AI has changed cybersecurity forever
THE AI IMPACT
The AI revolution has only increased the importance of cybersecurity. Although the impacts of AI on the enterprise is just beginning, CISOs are aware that the proliferation of apps powered by LLMs will radically reshape their security considerations in the years to come.
86% of CISOs said implementing AI tools was an important strategic priority over the next 1-2 years
58% said they’ve made strategy changes due to the AI revolution
Post-covid consolidation and AI will unlock a new innovation wave.
Arif Janmohamed
Lightspeed partner. Enterprise.
CISO SURVEY
EIGHT opportunities for cybersecurity builders
Based on data from the Lightspeed CISO survey and Gartner’s 3Q23 Information Security Sector Outlook, eight areas hold particular promise for future growth and startup and investment activity.
-
1
Identity Access
Management
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Identity access
Management
82%
of CISOs in Lightspeed’s survey said IAM was a very important spending priority this year.
IAM is forecast at $16.6 billion in 2023, growing at 15.7% in 2023 and at a five-year CAGR of 11.6%.
Gartner
65%
of CISOs in our survey said cloud infrastructure was very important among their spending priorities this year.
Cloud security is forecast at $5.8 billion in 2023, growing at 24.9% in 2023 and at a five-year CAGR of 22.5%.
Gartner
46%
of CISOs in our survey indicated application security as a very important spending priority this year.
Application security is forecast at $5.9 billion in 2023, growing at 14.6% in 2023 and at a five-year CAGR of 13.6%.
Gartner
97%
of CISOs in our survey said data security was a very important or important spending priority in their upcoming budget cycle.
Data privacy is forecast at $1.4 billion in 2023, growing at 17.7% in 2023 and at a five-year CAGR of 17.5%.
Gartner
87%
of CISOs in our survey said Zero Trust was an important spending priority in their upcoming budget cycle.
ZTNA is forecast at $1.5 billion in 2023, growing at 50.0% in 2023 and at a five-year CAGR of 31.1%.
“ZTNA is growing rapidly, and our forecast was recently increased.”
Gartner
91%
of CISOs in our survey said insurance/resilience was an important spending priority in their upcoming budget cycle.
Cyber Insurance is projected to grow from $10.3 billion in 2023 to $17.6 billion by 2028, at a CAGR of 11.4%.
86%
of CISOs in our survey said implementing AI tools was an important strategic priority over the next 1-2 years
54%
said the AI revolution has impacted their vendor choices
The potential for founders to build AI-native SECURITY solutions is perhaps the single greatest cyber opportunity of this ERA.
Guru Chahal
Lightspeed partner. Enterprise.
85%
of CISOs in our survey are concerned about AI/ML powered attacks
57%
are concerned about attacks on AI/ML systems
Only 34% of Organizations are already using or implementing AI Application Security Tools
Gartner
CISO SURVEY
What Cisos want from Builders
We asked: “are there tools or capabilities you wish you had that don't exist today?”
A selection of answers:
- IAM automation solutions and clear AI security solutions that are geared towards enterprise applications.
- IAM lifecycle as it pertains to cloud identity and boundary policies.
- Combined PAM for on premise and cloud.
- Better support for SaaS in the managed service/managed SIEM space.
- Natural language AI for my SOC teams to find bad guys faster.
- Fully integrated enterprise level solution, with a roadmap for continuous improvement and innovation, where the customers drive the enhancement and innovation.
- Holistic enterprise vulnerability scanning and reporting global regulatory and compliance management.
- Scalable approaches to tracking performance and reporting risk are critical to effectively informing executive decision makers.
HOW BUILDERS CAN RESPOND
CISOs are responsible for securing three distinct areas of business operations and responding to the Cambrian explosion of AI across the enterprise. Here’s how startups can approach the opportunity to win them as customers:
1. Secure Where business applications are run
- The transition to cloud is an opportunity for innovation.
- The need to secure legacy, on-prem systems will not disappear soon
2. SEcure How applications are built
- Application and developer security are constantly evolving
3. SEcure Who is allowed Access
- IAM is rapidly growing
- PAM is becoming required by cybersecurity insurers
4. Secure AI: The New Shadow IT
- By 2027, 75% of employees will acquire, modify or create technology outside IT’s visibility — up from 41% in 2022, according to Gartner.
- AI is likely to be the dominant technology underlying this adoption cycle. Over time, AI will dominate cybersecurity as the fundamental technology to build with, securely manage, and, of course, defend against.
AI: Everything, everywhere, all at once
- AI is touching every aspect of cybersecurity, at nearly every angle.
- Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of employees will acquire, modify or create technology outside IT’s visibility — up from 41% in 2022.
- Generative AI is likely to be the dominant technology underlying this adoption cycle. Over time, AI will dominate cybersecurity as the fundamental technology to build with, securely manage, and, of course, defend against.
The Cyber 60: The Top Venture-Backed Cybersecurity STARTUPS
Fortune Cyber 60
Lightspeed is proud to present the Cyber 60 with our partner, FORTUNE.
Meet the top 60 venture-backed cybersecurity companies in the market today. (See our Methodology page for more on how we created this list.)
These companies are led by visionaries; some are founders on the third startup, and some are striking out on their own for the first time. Some companies are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and some are pioneering new solutions that will become the platforms and technology standards of tomorrow.
We’re proud to recognize the Cyber 60 winners for 2024.
When Lightspeed is an investor in a Cyber 60 company, it is noted with a Lightspeed lettermark.
EARLY STAGE
-
CEO:
Nikhil Gupta
ArmorCode offers network and customer data encryption using algorithms, data leak protection, password protection, key management, and real-time issue identification, helping users with security tools and protection from third-party attacks.
-
CEO:
Belsasar Lepe
Cerby safeguards software by automating manual processes, uncovering security issues, and empowering users to implement zero trust principles, enabling businesses to protect the brand, be secure, and increase productivity.
-
CEO:
Dan Lorenc
Chainguard applies zero-trust principles to supply chain security to make the software lifecycle secure by default and uses compliant-build systems and integrations, enabling businesses to manage their supply chain security risks.
-
CEO:
Alex Bovee
ConductorOne decentralizes and democratizes access to cloud applications and infrastructure, while preserving least-privilege permissions, enabling IT professionals to avoid inefficient workflows and increase productivity and collaboration.
-
CEO:
Yotam Segev
Cyera automatically discovers and classifies data, protect it from exposure, and maintains a resilient posture, enabling organizations to manage and protect all of their company's sensitive data.
-
CEO:
Slavik Markovich
Descope offers software that engages in preserving device integrity & reducing user friction, providing app developers with more secure user access, enabling businesses passwordless authentication and user management to applications with a line of code.
-
CEO:
Varun Badhwar
Endor Labs helps to eliminate the complexity and frustration of selecting, securing, and maintaining software dependencies, enabling clients to keep up by maximizing the reuse of code, adopting microservices architectures, and relying on a vast array of third party tools.
-
CEO:
Arie Zilberstein
Gem Security delivers a centralized approach to tackle cloud native threats, from incident readiness to real-time threat detection, investigation, and response at the speed of the cloud, enabling businesses with cloud security automation for teams, behavioral analytics with attacker perspective, and bolstering existing security workflow.
-
CEO:
Lior Yaari
Grip Security brings comprehensive visibility across all enterprise SaaS applications known or unknown for apps, users, and their basic interactions with extreme accuracy to minimize false positives, enabling clients with deep visibility and a secure network in their workspace.
-
CEO:
Jon Miller
Halcyon offers layered ransomware protection that combines pre-execution detection, behavioral modeling and deception techniques, enabling clients to get resiliency, recovery, and isolation of impacted nodes for mid-market and enterprise customers.
-
CEO:
André Ferraz
Incognia offers services including data breach prevention, data encryption, secure authentication, location-based identity proofing and authentication, identity verification, and account takeover prevention, enabling companies to increase conversions, reduce false positives, and stop fraud.
-
CEO:
Amer Deeba
Normalyze is a provider of cloud data security solutions, helping customers secure their data, applications, identities, and infrastructure across hybrid cloud environments. With Normalyze, organizations can discover and visualize their data attack surface within minutes and get real-time visibility and control into their security posture, including access, configurations, and sensitive data to secure it at scale and prevent expensive data breaches.
-
CEO:
Stephen Cobbe
Opal aggregates identity and access data to provide visibility and defense-in-depth infrastructure for mission-critical systems, enabling enterprises to discover anomalous identity risks and remediate them in minutes.
-
- P0.DEV
- Founded 2022
- $5 MILLION
CEO:
Shashwat Sehgal
P0 services include automating privileged access workflows, identifying risks in cloud IAM, and automating periodic access reviews of the cloud environment, providing engineers with in-time and short-lived access to customer data in a cloud environment.
-
CEO:
Ian Swanson
Protect AI offers innovative security products and performs security scans with the use of machine learning models and artificial intelligence systems to access curated resources, learn best practices in machine learning security, listen to podcasts with thought leaders, and connect with a thriving community, enabling enterprises to build a safer AI-powered world.
-
CEO:
Shahar Ben-Hador
Radiant Security specializes in machine-based learning, classification, and ranking technology as well as artificial intelligence-driven path recognition, enabling organizations to respond to security incidents quickly and accurately, regardless of the size of their team.
-
CEO:
Yaron Singer
Robust Intelligence provides two complementary components that work in conjunction: automated tests of pre-production models and quality assurance tests of in-production models, enabling clients to get access to products that detect and eliminate contaminated data to ensure better model performance in non-trivial production environments.
-
CEO:
Al Yang
SafeBase offers custom security checklists, continuous monitoring of security systems, and configures security policies, enabling companies to implement security practices.
-
CEO:
Feross Aboukhadijeh
Socket uses sockets that help secure software applications and critical services against malware and provides visibility, defense-in-depth, and proactive supply chain protection for JavaScript and Python dependencies security threats, enabling companies to reduce security risks.
-
CEO:
Amiram Shachar
Upwind provides cybersecurity and manages risks which helps to leverage runtime data to secure cloud infrastructure, enabling organizations to get cyber protection.
MID STAGE
-
CEO:
Brendan O'Connor
AppOmni uses a scanning technology that identifies cloud API data leaks and other security exposures and delivers continuous monitoring of SaaS applications, enabling businesses to identify and prevent data exposure, manage data leaks, and receive timely warnings and insights to reduce the time to remediation.
-
CEO:
Guy Moskowitz
Coro employs AI technology to identify and remediate the many security threats that today's distributed businesses face, without the IT teams having to investigate or fix the issues themselves, enabling businesses to be resilient to cyber threats.
-
CEO:
Howard Ting
Cyberhaven assesses internal actions across the enterprise to find risky behaviors and practices before they lead to a breach and provides full-context data tracing to avoid false negatives and false positives and accelerates incident response investigations, enabling clients to protect their data efficiently.
-
CEO:
Adam Markowitz
Drata features an autopilot system that allows automated monitoring and evidence collection along with actionable insights, reports, alerts and SaaS integrations among others, enabling enterprises to build trust, accelerate sales and scale their businesses securely.
-
CEO:
Snehal Antani
Horizon3.ai fuses military cyber operators with artificial intelligence experts and product engineers to deliver continuously automated red teaming as a service to break in, steal critical data, and close the loop with automated and supervised fixes, enabling organizations to defend their data, prioritize vulnerabilities and exercise security controls.
-
CEO:
Kyle Hanslovan
Huntress uses a combination of automated detection and human-powered threat hunting to find and stop hidden threats that sneak past preventive security tools, enabling resellers to protect their customers from persistent footholds, ransomware, and other attacks.
-
CEO:
Mike Fey
Island gives organizations complete control, visibility, and governance over the last mile helping the enterprise with improved performance, enabling businesses to minimize their cyber footprint and create a safe space for work to flow.
-
CEO:
Dan Wendlandt
Isovalent delivers improved networking and security capabilities to the most demanding of enterprise users, enabling clients to get a simple and efficient way to define and enforce both network-layer and application-layer security policies based on container or pod identity.
-
CEO:
Erkang Zheng
JupiterOne offers tools for security operations teams to shorten the path required for compliance and improve overall posture through continuous data aggregation and relationship modeling across all assets, enabling businesses to visualize relationships in their digital environment to understand what exactly is going on.
-
CEO:
Roni Fuchs
Legit Security offers visibility and contextual information that need to minimize risk and gives tools to ensure teams and build processes adhere to best practices, enabling businesses to stay secure while releasing software fast.
-
CEO:
Oz Golan
NoName specializes in protecting APIs in real-time and detecting vulnerabilities and misconfigurations before they are exploited, and that doesn't require agents or network modifications. NoName offers deeper visibility and security than API gateways and load balancers, enabling clients to protect their APIs from data leakage, authorization issues, abuse, misuse, and data corruption with no agents and no network modifications.
-
CEO:
Jack Naglieri
Panther uses artificial intelligence and cloud-first cybersecurity monitoring and assists security teams to detect and respond to breaches at the cloud scale, enabling businesses to identify threats, misconfigurations, and suspicious activity across corporate and security environments.
-
CEO:
Vishaal “V8” Hariprasad
Resilience is the cyber risk solution company
that helps financial, risk, and information security leaders continuously improve their organizations' cyber resilience. Founded in 2016 by experts from across the highest tiers of the U.S. military and augmented by leaders and innovators from the insurance and technology industries, Resilience connects cyber insurance coverage with advanced cybersecurity visibility and a shared plan to reinforce actionable cyber hygiene.
-
CEO:
HD Moore
RunZero leverages applied research and is powered by a research-driven model for fingerprinting, helping organizations find and identify managed and unmanaged assets connected to their networks and in the cloud.
-
CEO:
Isaac Evans
Semgrep automatically scrutinizes and ranks code from the entire software ecosystem, seeking out vulnerabilities, questionable practices, and examples of excellence from tech giants and open source leaders, enabling developers, security teams, and researchers to compare the safety of open source projects and cultivate knowledge.
-
CEO:
Michael Bresman
Semperis offers the availability of critical enterprise directory services at every step in the cyber kill chain and cuts recovery time and protects identities from cyberattacks, data breaches, and operational errors, enabling clients with identity-first security, starting with the core of the identity infrastructure.
-
CEO:
Tim Prendergast
StrongDM streamlines work to onboard or off-board technical staff and provides real-time monitoring for identifying data errors which helps to reduce the error rectification process, enabling organizations to eliminate all the hassle to manage database permissions and make compliance convenient.
-
CEO:
Avery Pennarun
Tailscale's secure networks offer a minimal latency network that connects servers, computers, and cloud instances through the existing identity provider with fixed IP, auto-assigned domain, and access controls, providing clients and teams a VPN with no upfront cost, minimal latency, and working with existing services.
-
CEO:
Danny Jenkins
Threatlocker maintains a database of applications that is automatically updated through auditing features that block any unknown software from executing within the environment, and from known and approved software executing outside of its allowed perimeter, enabling businesses to maintain data privacy while transacting digitally.
-
CEO:
Tarun Thakur
Veza supports both on-premise and cloud systems and makes it possible to understand the sensitive nature of data, manage human identities, and service accounts across various disparate data systems, applications, and cloud services, enabling data and security teams to stay secure, compliant, and deliver value to the business.
LATE STAGE
-
CEO:
Jeffrey Shiner
1Password's software offers to maintain strong credentials, manage access to services, report on usage, and also provides private, secure, and user-friendly password management, enabling users to prevent breaches and reclaim time spent guessing or resetting passwords.
-
CEO:
Evan Resier
Abnormal Security uses an artificial intelligence-based approach that deeply understands the people, relationships, and business processes to understand abnormal behavior and block socially engineered and sophisticated cyber-attacks that lead to account takeover, financial damage, and organizational mistrust, enabling businesses to prevent direct attacks on their confidential data.
-
CEO:
Dror Davidoff
Aqua provides full visibility and security automation across an application's entire lifecycle as well as prevents suspicious activities and attacks, enabling enterprises to secure their container-based applications from development to production, accelerating container adoption, and bridging the gap between DevOps and IT security.
-
CEO:
Nick Schneider
Arctic Wolf offers continuous vulnerability and risk management and uses APIs and machine learning to offer real-time monitoring, analysis, and alerts on users' behavioral and cloud resources, enabling businesses to combat cybercrime and detect threats without the need of building their own security operations center.
-
CEO:
Rotem Iram
At-Bay offers proactive risk management services to go along with insurance coverage and analyzes, models, and predicts cyber risks to create coverage for clients and partners with brokers to deliver a comprehensive risk management program, enabling clients to manage and control digital risks.
-
CEO:
Doug Merritt
Aviatrix delivers an enterprise-grade secure cloud network, backbone, and edge for mission-critical applications by creating a simplified and consistent networking architecture in and across cloud service providers, empowering businesses to accelerate innovation, minimize downtime, and gain control of IT costs.
-
CEO:
Dean Sysman
Axonius delivers a unified, extensible, and open system that integrates information from networked devices and existing device-specific standalone management services, creating a single visibility and control environment, enabling security operations teams to safely engage device adoption and usage at scale.
-
CEO:
Shlomo Kramer
Cato Networks converges software-defined networking in a wide area of network and network security into a global, cloud-native service and allows customers to migrate from multiprotocol label switching easily, enabling businesses to optimize application access for all users and locations efficiently.
-
CEO:
Yaniv Vardi
Claroty's unified platform integrates with customers' existing infrastructure to provide a full range of controls for visibility, risk and vulnerability management, threat detection, and secure remote access, safety, and reliability of assets and networks without requiring downtime or dedicated teams, enabling organizations to get more uptime and greater efficiency across business and production operations.
-
CEO:
Joshua Motta
Coalition offers Active Cyber Insurance, combining risk assessment, security protection, and response, all in one place, enabling companies to manage, mitigate, and prevent cyber-attacks and losses before they occur.
-
CEO:
Clint Sharp
Cribl helps to identify wasted ingestion, efficiently route low-value data, enrich data with business context, and secure data based on compliance and privacy mandates, enabling businesses to get observability, intelligence, and control over their real-time data.
-
CEO:
Adam Geller
Exabeam utilizes user and entity behavior analytics, based on security-based data science and innovative stateful user tracking technology to detect insider threats and data exfiltration, and provides an automated incident response to minimize security blind spots, enabling clients to detect and thwart cyber attacks that would otherwise go unseen by most enterprises.
-
CEO:
Dave Merkel
Expel detects and responds to threats in minutes and provides computer security with complete transparency and dedicated all-day long access to security analysts who monitor and proactively find attackers, enabling businesses to filter out false positives and quickly engage on the threats they need to care about.
-
CEO:
David Erickson
Forward Networks offers network visibility, policy verification, and changes modeling to deliver a mathematically accurate copy to simplify network operations, enabling engineers and operators to easily visualize and search complex networks, quickly debug problems, verify network-wide policy correctness and predict network path.
-
CEO:
Sanjay Beri
Netskope understands the cloud and delivers data-centric security, and gives granular context, via patented technology, to enable conditional access and user awareness while enforcing zero trust principles, providing clients with assistance in business velocity and securing their digital transformation journey.
-
CEO:
Kabir Barday
Onetrust's platform is comprehensive, integrated, and technology-oriented and helps in readiness and privacy impact assessments, data inventory and mapping automation, website scanning and consent management, subject rights requests, incident reporting, and vendor risk management, enabling businesses to comply with data privacy regulations across sectors and jurisdictions.
-
CEO:
Bipul Sinha
Rubrik offers recoveries, hands-free management, automated workflows, and speedy backups in order to minimize data loss with natively integrated continuous data protection, enabling enterprises to achieve data control by driving business resiliency, cloud mobility and regulatory compliance.
-
- SNYK.IO
- Founded 2015
- $1,200 MILLION
CEO:
Peter McKay
Snyk offers tools that help to find, fix, and monitor known threats in open-source dependencies, secure authoring, and consumption of open-source code, enabling enterprises and developers to use open-source without compromising security.
-
CEO:
Christina Cacioppo
Vanta helps companies to scale security practices and automate compliance for the industry's most sought-after standards, and other in-demand security and privacy frameworks, enabling businesses to have a credible security program and obtain compliance certifications.
-
- wiz.io
- Founded 2020
- $900 MILLION
CEO:
Assaf Rappaport
Wiz offers cloud visibility services for enterprise security by offering an overview of security risks across clouds, containers, and workloads without the need for agents or sidecars, enabling businesses to identify vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, network exposure, manage identities and privileges, and discover exposed secrets.
METHODOLOGY
The CISO Survey was conducted by Lightspeed Venture Partners, polling 214 members of our CxO network – a group of over 1,000 C-suite executives from around the globe that advise Lightspeed on the market landscape in their respective sectors and industries.
Responses were collected in September 2023 and aggregated for anonymity and operational security.
The FORTUNE Cyber 60 is a listing of the most important venture-backed startups that have not had an IPO, acquisition, or other significant exit event.
The list is alphabetized into groups of 20 by stage: early stage companies, early growth stage companies, and growth stage companies.
To construct the 2024 Cyber 60 list, Lightspeed requested data from over 300 cybersecurity startups and performed an initial sort by ARR and current and prior year growth rate.
Lightspeed then validated the accuracy of the self-reported data and reviewed the business operations of each company for inclusion. Lightspeed partners also nominated companies for consideration based on proprietary research including consultation with our CISO network, and analysis of the cybersecurity market landscape. No company was added or removed from the list for any other reason except those listed above. Pitchbook provided additional data listed here, including company descriptions and funding data.
ABOUT LIGHTSPEED
SERVING THE BOLD BUILDERS OF THE FUTURE.
For over twenty years Lightspeed has been the first investor and an early backer of some of the most innovative companies in the world.
In service of bold founders with big ideas, we stand behind our Founders with high conviction, from Seed to Series F and beyond. We pursue opportunities based on their merits, regardless of where the Founder resides, because the future is global and so are we, with offices in 13 locations across 7 countries, comprising one Lightspeed community.