As technology and related threats evolve, so do our cyber security needs. Businesses now require a huge number of applications to function, and there is increasing demand to streamline and speed up processes. What’s more, privacy rules continue to complexify data management, creating further challenges. Add to the mix the fact that many businesses have had to shift to remote-work models during the pandemic, and we find ourselves with a great number of security demands that require innovative solutions.
Thankfully, the cybersecurity world is bursting full of bright minds and budding entrepreneurs. Some have many years of experience while others bring a fresh perspective to the field. What this means is we see a ton of successful startups forging their way to help customers achieve a safer, more secure online environment.
Below, we reveal our top 30 cyber security startups to watch in 2021. Where included, funding figures are courtesy of Crunchbase.
Axis Security
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: California, USA
Axis Security’s core product, Axis Application Access Cloud, is a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. It’s a flexible, scalable solution for app access that lets users quickly connect to private apps from any device. The agentless platform is built on zero-trust and includes centralized management and automated adaptive policies. It enables customers to monitor user behavior, limit access or actions, integrate with other security platforms, disarm attacks, and eliminate network privileges.
In September 2020, Axis Security raised $32 million in Series B funding for a total of $49 million over three rounds. According to Joydeep Bhattacharyya, general partner of lead investor Canaan Partners:
Axis has quickly established itself with a differentiated, already proven approach to the decades-old problem of securing application access. What has been most impressive to us is how the company has moved quickly and met the opportunity since coming out of stealth in March.
Bitglass
Founded: 2013
Headquartered: California, USA
Bitglass is a cloud access security broker offering a core product called Total Cloud Security. This provides agentless advanced threat protection and web security across all apps and devices. Bitglass hangs its hat on performance and uptime, recognizing how crucial business continuity is for its customers.
During the pandemic, the company has adapted its product and marketing to put a strong focus on protecting organizations using a remote work model. The company has been named a leader in its quadrant by Gartner for the past three years. Bitglass secured Series D funding of $70 million in August 2019.
(Update: Forcepoint completed its acquisition of Security Service Edge (SSE) leader Bitglass on October 22, 2021)
Cado Security
Founded: 2020
Headquartered: UK
Cado Security has become a trailblazer in the world of cloud security and is the first company to offer a cloud-native forensics and response platform, called Cado Response. This tool provides users with in-depth information about the impact of security incidents, providing them with the agility to enact real-time responses.
CEO James Campbell formerly worked in Cyber Threat Detection and Response at PricewaterhouseCoopers. In November 2020, the company raised $1.5 million in seed funding which will be used to expand its UK-based development team. As for future plans, speaking to Tech Company News, Campbell explains:
Currently we’re on-boarding development customers to our Cado Response platform. The short term focus is giving them the best possible experience, then making the platform more generally available.
Capsule8
Founded: 2016
Headquartered: New York, USA
Capsule8 is considered a pioneer in infrastructure security for Linux systems. It provides monitoring, detection, and protection specifically built for production systems. The platform, named Capsule 8 Protect, can help defend against security mechanism disablement, container attacks, memory corruption, and other threats.
A second Series B funding round in August 2019 netted the company $6.5 million, bringing its total raised to $30 million. In November 2020, Capsule8 announced enhancements to its platform (including improving cryptomining detection and remote, interactive shell detection), displaying its agility in keeping up with changes in the threat landscape.
Confluera
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: California
Confluera is focused on providing an autonomous solution that helps users detect security attacks in real-time. Confluera XDR tracks all activity in a system and combines this information with machine-comprehended detection of threats. Threats are automatically mapped out, and stopped and remediated in real time before damage occurs. Earlier this year, Confluera raised $20 million in Series B funding with plans to utilize the funds to grow its workforce.
Cyberbit
Founded: 2015
Headquartered: Israel
Cyberbit raised $70 million in Venture funding in May 2020, following a round that raised $30 million back in 2018. Cyberbit offers cyber team development in the form of hands-on training programs. Dubbed “zero to hero cyber skilling,” programs provide participants with the knowledge they need to address advanced cyberattacks. They then practice their new skills before applying them in simulated yet realistic incidents.
Cybrary
Founded: 2015
Headquartered: Maryland, USA
Cybrary is another education-based platform, but it’s geared towards individuals as well as businesses. It provides a huge library of cybersecurity professional development courses and works on a freemium subscription model. Users can access limited content for free or pay a monthly fee for full access to the entire library, including video courses, skills assessments, virtual labs, and practice tests. Cybrary also offers career path advice as well as coaching and networking.
The company has been growing steadily since 2015, but secured a hefty sum of $15 million in Series B funding in November 2020. Cybrary has been doing its part to help those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic by offering an extended range of free courses.
Cymulate
Founded: 2016
Headquartered: Israel
Cymulate offers a breach and attack simulation platform that enables security teams to quickly identify and fix gaps. Users can simulate attacks across all vectors, discover where exposures lie, and take steps to rectify weaknesses. Automation allows for constant monitoring without draining resources. In November 2019, Cymulate raised $15 million in Series B funding, and a total of $26 million in investor funds has been injected into the company since its inception.
Cysiv
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: Texas, USA
Cysiv is a SOCaaS (Security Operations Center as a Service) provider that went through Series A funding in early 2020, raising $26 million. Now operating as an independent company, Cysiv was originally formed as the result of a partnership between HITRUST and Trend Micro, with the goal of providing advanced cyber threat protection to US companies.
Packages include the key elements of a round-the-clock SOC including telemetry collection and storage, a management platform, continuous threat monitoring, on-hand experts, threat triage, and incident management. The platform automates critical activities and works across technologies and vendors. Cysiv offers a usage-based monthly billing model with discounts for long-term commitments.
DataFleets
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: California, USA
DataFleets offers a data analytics platform with a focus on privacy. Its data engine is geared towards data scientists and developers, unifying distributed data and allowing for quick access and flexible analytics. One of the big draws of this technology is that compliance is automated, removing many of the headaches experienced by data collectors and analysts.
DataFleets allows users to easily analyze information between business units, even during cloud migration. It can help speed up data science projects while helping organizations overcome the issue of protecting data privacy.
In October 2020, DataFleets received $4.5 million in seed funding. As noted by COO Nick Elledge:
We’ve had to turn away or postpone new customer demand to focus on our work with our lighthouse customers.
The seed round should give the company the funding it needs to scale and mature its product.
DefenseStorm
Founded: 2014
Headquartered: Georgia, USA
DefenseStorm is a cybersecurity and cybercompliance company that specializes in the banking sector. DefenseStorm GRID is a platform that offers 24/7 monitoring and streamlines multiple areas of cybersecurity including detection, investigation, reporting, and compliance. The company’s Threat Ready Active Compliance (TRAC) team of security experts monitors networks and alerts users to potential threats. In July 2019, DefenseStorm closed out a Series A funding round, raising $15 million.
According to a DefenseStorm press release:
This round of funding will accelerate several of DefenseStorm’s strategic growth initiatives including technical and user-facing product changes and establishing greater platform efficiency and scalability.
Enso Security
Founded: 2020
Headquartered: Israel
Enso Security is in its infancy but secured $6 million in seed funding in October 2020. It offers an application security posture management platform designed to provide security teams with full visibility and coordination capabilities during app development.
Development teams often face confusion and consequent issues related to app security. Enso consolidates data and provides collaboration tools, allowing for transparency in and streamlining of the appsec development process. It aims to increase automation while reducing risk and measuring the effectiveness of resources, ultimately providing a solution that improves security while lowering the workload.
Ethyca
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: New York, USA
Ethyca makes a platform for managing consumer data privacy compliance. Trying to comply with data privacy laws can be overwhelming for many organizations when added to their everyday operations. There is a demand for tools that take the stress out of this task and help organizations instill consumer trust. As remarked by co-founder and CEO Cillian Kieran:
The aim here is to build safe systems, and we provide the data and data maps to do that.
Ethyca’s offering automates compliance tasks, reducing the risk of errors, and freeing up resources for other business tasks. Features include real-time data mapping, automate subject requests, consent management, and subject erasure handling. Essentially, the platform gives companies the means to easily identify sensitive information and offer customers the opportunity to view, edit, and delete their information. A Series A funding round earned the company $13.5 million in June 2020.
Evervault
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: Ireland
Evervault has a pioneering vision of creating true data privacy for internet users. Evervault’s inaugural offering is the Evervault Cage, a privacy vault that enables developers to encrypt data as it enters an app. The data is then processed within the secure cage without the use of servers, such that user information is never stored unencrypted. Privacy cages are tailored to specific applications and will be especially useful to companies handling particularly sensitive data, such as financial institutions and healthcare organizations.
Founder Shane Curran is just 20 years old but has already proven himself to be a more than capable entrepreneur, securing $16.2 million in Series A funding in May 2020.
Talking to CNBC, Ari Helgason, principal at lead investor Index Ventures remarked:
We were immediately super intrigued. Who was this 19-year-old who has won lots of science prizes, just finished high school and then jumped right into building heavy-duty, enterprise-grade encryption? That was already very unusual and enough to pique our interest.
Havoc Shield
Founded: 2019
Headquartered: Illinois, USA
Havoc Shield’s platform offers a suite of features to help small businesses tackle cyberthreats. High costs and complex implementation often represent barriers preventing small businesses access to comprehensive cyber protection. The idea behind Havoc Shield’s offering is to deliver the robust security standards and compliance features employed by large companies in a package that fits smaller businesses.
With these enhanced protocols in place, smaller companies can promise the same level of security large companies do and have a better chance of working alongside those companies in the future. Features include threat testing and monitoring, phishing protection, policy generation, and compliance assistance, among other features. Havoc Shield raised $1.5 million in seed funding in November 2020.
Immuta
Founded: 2014
Headquartered: Massachusetts, USA
Immuta’s offering is a data governance platform that automates data management including aspects such as access control and privacy compliance. It ensures that users don’t inadvertently access data they are not supposed to see, depending on their role or approved purpose. Organizations using the Immuta platform seek to adhere to data privacy rules such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA, and enhance trust across sectors including security, data engineering, compliance, legal, and business teams.
In November 2020, Databricks named Immuta as the winner of the 2020 ISV Rising Star Award and the company was named one of Inc Magazine’s best places to work in May 2020. The company raised $40 million in Series C funding in June 2020.
Isovalent
Founded: 2017
Headquartered: California, USA
Isovalent offers Cilium, a scalable infrastructure designed to provide networking, monitoring, and security capabilities. The Cilium Enterprise solution overcomes challenges associated with complex workloads within large organizations such as those related to security automation, compliance, forensic, access control, and integration. Isovalent counts Google and Cisco among its investors and got a boost in November 2020 when it received $29 million in Series A funding.
JupiterOne
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: North Carolina, USA
JupiterOne provides a data centralization tool that collects data from multiple cloud services and presents them in a single hub. JupiterOne aggregates data and models relationships to simplify cloud security and data compliance processes. It integrates with dozens of AWS services and security and DevOps tools, automates inventory of data resources and assets, and presents insights in a customized dashboard. Series A funding of $19 million was announced in September 2020.
Lightspin
Founded: 2020
Headquartered: Israel
Lightspin raised $4 million in its November 2020 seed investing round. Its product, Lightspin Contextual Cloud Security for Native, Kubernetes, and Microservices, enables organizations to visualize and detect attack paths as well as block them. The agentless platform maps out cloud environments, uses predictive algorithms to discover threats and displays critical items and corresponding remediation actions.
Orca Security
Founded: 2019
Headquartered: California, USA
Orca Security has only been around since 2019 but has already secured $82 million in funding. Using an innovative approach, this company provides agentless security and compliance for AWS, GCP, and Azure. It enables users to quickly detect cloud security risks so they can be addressed in a timely manner. Orca employs its patent-pending Side-ScanningTM technology to quickly cover all workloads and uses environmental context to prioritize risks. It can detect vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, malware, weak or leaked passwords, and more.
Orca’s most recent Series B funding round raised $55 million and came just seven months after a successful Series A round. It’s reported that some of its rapid growth can be attributed to the global pandemic. According to co-founder and CEO Avi Shea:
COVID certainly increased demand. Most companies were moving to the cloud, but COVID accelerated it.
Perimeter 81
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: Israel
Perimeter 81 was founded in 2018 and has quickly been gaining traction, closing out a Series B funding round that raised $40 million in August 2020. The company has several network security products, including a VPN that actually tops our list of best business VPNs.
Perimeter 81 introduced its newest product Zero Trust Application Access in July 2020. This tool helps ensure agentless, zero-trust access to protect networks from malware and other attacks, as well as unauthorized exfiltration of data. The company was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in 2019.
Persona
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: California, USA
Persona has been gaining traction in the short time since its inception and raised $17.5 million in Series A funding in January 2020.
Its identity platform is designed to secure both sides of online transactions, improving data handling, streamlining the process for users, and deterring fraud. It does this by automating the identity verification process, removing the need for review by humans. As a result, company liability is reduced and you have a secure, scalable infrastructure for verifying customers and collecting sensitive data. The platform is customizable and may be tailored to fit specific use cases and brands.
Privafy
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: Massachusetts, USA
Privafy offers cloud-based security solutions designed to secure “data-in-motion.” One of its selling points is that 80 percent of data breaches reportedly occur while data is traveling between networks and devices or in the cloud. Privafy makes separate products targeted toward specific industries, including CarrierEgde for telecommunications service providers, MicroEdge for the IoT industry, and CloudEdge for enterprises. The company raised $22 million in a Venture funding round in January 2020.
Randori
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: Massachusetts, USA
Randori is considered a pioneer in the world of cybersecurity. Its mission is “to ensure every organization has a trusted adversary to practice against.” Randori mirrors adversaries to show organizations where their weaknesses lie. By gaining an attacker’s insight, users have improved visibility of threats and their potential impact. Randoori is rounding out a great year with a slew of high-caliber hires. After raising $20 million in Series A funding in April 2020, the company seems to be going from strength to strength.
SecureStack
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: Queensland, Australia
SecureStack’s CloudBuilder platform aims to help developers improve security while reducing the time spent on finding and fixing security and scalability gaps. It claims to offer a 60–70 percent reduction in an app’s attack surface. Security controls are customizable and use intelligent automation. Advanced analytics and logging help enterprises scale their applications. In a seed funding round in November 2020, SecurityStack raised AUD$1.5 million.
SECURITI.ai
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: California, USA
SECURITI.ai, as its name suggests, brings AI to the field of cybersecurity. It’s a PrivacyOps company that helps organizations automate privacy compliance and secure data. Features of the full-stack platform include a personal data graph builder, a data subject request automation, and third-party privacy assessment and ratings, among others. Data security features help users identify data that is considered high risk and enable the appropriate protections. Following Series A funding of $31 million in August 2019, SECURITI.ai secured a further $50 million in a January 2020 Series B round.
Stairwell
Founded: 2019
Headquartered: California, USA
Stairwell was founded just last year by Mike Wiacek, who also founded the Threat Analysis Group at Google and co-founded Google’s Chronicle security platform. Interestingly, there isn’t a ton of information available about what Stairwell is actually selling, with Wiacek remaining tight-lipped on the topic. That said, whatever has been revealed has been enough to secure funding from investors, with Stairwell raising $4.5 million in seed round funding in October 2020.
Ubiq Security
Founded: 2019
Headquartered: California, USA
Ubiq Security’s tagline is “Encryption made simple for developers.” Indeed, Ubiq’s encryption platform is already proving extremely popular and counts Verizon, Hitachi, the United States Army, and the Department of Homeland Security as customers.
The platform enables developers to quickly and simply integrate customer-side encryption into their applications using a few lines of code. Ubiq’s first seed funding round in November raised $6.4 million.
Unit21
Founded: 2018
Headquartered: California, USA
Unit21 provides customers with a simple API and dashboard for helping protect against threats. It can detect and manage fraud, money laundering, and other risks across a range of industries. Unit21’s cloud-based system is intelligent and customizable with features including transaction monitoring, case management, identity and other verification, reporting, and analytics. Unit21 secured $13 million in Series A financing in October 2020, which it plans to use to grow its team, boost marketing efforts, and spread to new industries.
Vdoo
Founded: 2017
Headquartered: Israel
Vdoo offers a device security platform that can be integrated across a network. It provides security analysis, gap resolution, embedded protection, operations monitoring, compliance validation, and actionable insights. The product can be tailored to specific industries including medical devices, automotive and transportation, network and telecom, and more. Vdoo’s latest Series B funding round closed in August 2019 and raised $32 million. This brought the company’s total investor funding to $55 million.