ammune.ai (formerly L7 Defense) is a cybersecurity company that builds ammune™, a fully autonomous, AI-based platform for protecting APIs - and, increasingly, AI systems and data centers - from cyberattacks. Using unsupervised machine learning, ammune auto-discovers APIs and builds a tailored protection layer for each one inline from the first request, blocking dozens of attack types (bots, DDoS, business-logic abuse, injection) in real time without pre-training or rule-writing. The platform is platform-agnostic, running on-premises, in the cloud, in Kubernetes clusters, and offloaded onto DPUs such as NVIDIA BlueField-2, and it recently expanded toward offline, air-gapped protection for AI workloads.
iboss is a Boston-based cloud security company that delivers a cloud-native Zero Trust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform. Founded in 2003 by twin brothers Paul and Peter Martini, iboss consolidates network security functions - secure web gateway, ZTNA, CASB, data loss prevention and firewall - into a single SaaS service that connects users to applications from anywhere while replacing legacy VPNs, proxy appliances and VDI. The platform is used by thousands of enterprises, government agencies and school districts, and processes over 100 billion transactions daily.
Palo Alto Networks is a global cybersecurity company that helps organizations prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats across networks, clouds, endpoints and identities. Founded in 2005 by Nir Zuk, it pioneered the next-generation firewall and has since expanded into an integrated security platform spanning network security (Strata), cloud security (Prisma), and AI-driven security operations (Cortex). Serving roughly 70,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including most of the Fortune 100, it is one of the largest pure-play cybersecurity vendors in the world.
CrowdStrike is a cloud-native cybersecurity company built around its Falcon platform, a single lightweight software agent that combines endpoint detection, cloud workload protection, identity security, threat intelligence and, increasingly, AI-driven detection and response. Founded in 2011 by George Kurtz, Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston, the company delivers security as a subscription service, collecting telemetry from millions of endpoints to spot attacks in real time. It serves large enterprises, governments and mid-market firms, trades on the Nasdaq as CRWD, and is a component of the S&P 500.
Fortinet is a global cybersecurity company founded in 2000 by brothers Ken and Michael Xie. Best known for its FortiGate firewalls and purpose-built security ASICs, Fortinet converges networking and security into a single platform - the Fortinet Security Fabric - powered by the FortiOS operating system. It serves enterprises, service providers, and governments in more than 100 countries, and in 2025 reported $6.8 billion in revenue.
Check Point Software Technologies is an Israeli cybersecurity company founded in 1993 that pioneered the modern firewall with its stateful inspection technology. Today it runs the Infinity platform - a unified, AI-powered security architecture spanning network (Quantum), cloud (CloudGuard), and workspace (Harmony) - protecting more than 100,000 organizations across roughly 60 countries. Publicly traded on NASDAQ as CHKP, it reported about $2.73 billion in 2025 revenue.
Impart Security is a San Francisco cybersecurity company building a unified runtime protection platform for AI, APIs, and web applications. Founded in 2020 by Signal Sciences veterans Jonathan DiVincenzo, Marc Harrison, and Brian Joe, the company merges WAF, API security, Cloud Application Detection & Response, and AI Runtime Protection into one engine that runs autonomous defense agents inside production traffic.
dope.security is a Mountain View cybersecurity startup that rebuilt the Secure Web Gateway (SWG) so it runs directly on the endpoint instead of routing traffic through a vendor's cloud datacenter. Founded in 2021 by ex-Symantec and Forcepoint product leader Kunal Agarwal, its 'fly-direct' architecture inspects web traffic on-device, claiming faster performance, fewer outages, and better privacy than legacy cloud proxies. The company has expanded from its core dope.swg product into AI-powered data protection with CASB Neural and DOPAMINE DLP, backed by roughly $20M from GV (Google Ventures) and Boldstart Ventures.
Santiago Rosenblatt broke into PayPal and NBA League Pass at age six, found a marketplace glitch at fourteen that let him buy electronics for the price of shipping, then turned that curiosity into a career defending banks and fintechs. Today he is Founder and CEO of Strike, an AI-led continuous pentesting platform that compresses vulnerability detection from months to hours, protects 120+ companies across 20+ countries, and raised a $13.5M Series A to expand across the U.S. and Brazil.
SentinelOne is an American cybersecurity company that builds the AI-powered Singularity Platform, autonomous software that detects, hunts, and responds to attacks across endpoints, cloud, identity, and data in real time. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, it pioneered machine-learning-driven endpoint protection that works without human intervention and now competes head-to-head with CrowdStrike and Microsoft in the enterprise security market. After the largest cybersecurity IPO in history in 2021, the company crossed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue in 2025.
Andrew Conway is Vice President of Security Marketing at Microsoft, where he has spent over 20 years driving the go-to-market strategy for one of the world's largest security businesses. A prolific author on the Microsoft Security Blog and a regular media voice on cybersecurity workforce challenges and AI-powered defense, Conway has shepherded Microsoft's security marketing from the Enterprise Mobility + Security era through to today's AI-native Security Copilot and Defender Experts Suite. He is the senior-most marketing executive dedicated to Microsoft's $20B+ security business and an outspoken advocate for using AI as a force multiplier for overwhelmed security defenders.
Bhagwat Swaroop is the CEO of Sonatype, the software supply chain security company behind the Nexus platform and the world's largest repository of open source component intelligence. Appointed in July 2025, he brings nearly 30 years of cybersecurity and enterprise software leadership from Entrust, One Identity, Proofpoint, Symantec, NetApp, McKinsey, and Intel. Armed with an MBA from Wharton and an MS in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State, Swaroop is betting that developers - not perimeter firewalls - are the new front line of cybersecurity, and he's building Sonatype's AI-powered platform to prove it.
Bipul Sinha is the CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Rubrik, the publicly traded data security company he built from a Bihar basement story into a $17B+ NYSE-listed cybersecurity platform. Before founding Rubrik in 2014, he spent nearly a decade as a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners — backing companies like Nutanix and Hootsuite — and nine years at Oracle holding 30+ patents in distributed computing. An IIT Kharagpur and Wharton alumnus who grew up in poverty in Darbhanga, Bihar, Sinha turned a contrarian bet on backup-and-recovery software into the gold standard for enterprise data resilience in the ransomware era.
Hatem Naguib is a cybersecurity operator who spent a decade at Barracuda Networks, the last four years as CEO, steering its shift into a platform-based, recurring-revenue security company. Before Barracuda he helped scale VMware's NSX networking and security business past $600M. He stepped down from Barracuda in September 2025 and joined Corelight's board of directors in May 2026.
Cobalt is the pioneer of Pentest as a Service (PtaaS), pairing a curated community of vetted offensive-security experts (the Cobalt Core) with a SaaS platform that turns penetration testing from a months-long procurement exercise into an on-demand, continuous program. Founded in 2013, the company now serves 1,500+ customers and is leaning hard into AI-augmented offensive security.
Mimic is a Palo Alto-based enterprise cybersecurity company building a dedicated ransomware defense platform. Its SaaS detects ransomware in fractions of a second, deflects attacks before damage is done, and lets organizations recover in seconds instead of weeks - all while letting threat actors think they succeeded.
Bill Robbins is the Chief Executive Officer of Menlo Security, a Mountain View-based cybersecurity company specializing in browser-based security and AI-driven threat prevention. With over 30 years of enterprise technology sales and leadership experience across Symantec, Nuance Communications, FireEye, Mandiant, and Sophos, Robbins joined Menlo as President in November 2024 and was elevated to CEO in February 2026 after helping the company surpass $140M in ARR. He now leads Menlo's push into AI agent security and agentic AI runtime protection, targeting the next wave of enterprise threats.
Ratan Tipirneni is President and CEO of Tigera, the company behind Project Calico - the open-source container networking and security project powering over 100 million containers across 8 million nodes in 166 countries. A serial entrepreneur with stints at Cisco, Actifio, Sun Microsystems, and SupportSoft, he joined Tigera in 2017 and has since grown it into the definitive platform for Kubernetes security, observability, and now AI workload protection.
Upwind is a runtime-first Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) that unifies cloud and AI security across the full lifecycle. Founded in 2022 by the team behind Spot.io, the company uses eBPF-based runtime telemetry to give security teams real-time context on what's actually exploitable in production - cutting noise, surfacing real threats, and protecting cloud-native and AI workloads at the speed they run.
Vanta is the trust management platform that automates security and compliance for more than 16,000 companies - turning SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR and dozens of other frameworks from a months-long PDF marathon into something a startup can pass before lunch.
Wallarm is a San Francisco-based API and application security company protecting more than half of public-facing APIs at large enterprises with a unified platform for API discovery, attack prevention, and AI-era threat protection.
Sonali Shah is the CEO of Cobalt, the leading Pentest as a Service (PtaaS) platform, where she took the helm in August 2024 after serving on its board. A product visionary and operator with 20+ years in cybersecurity, she pioneered the first cybersecurity risk rating platform at Bitsight, helped shepherd Veracode through its $950 million sale to Thoma Bravo, and drove Invicti's $625 million acquisition before stepping up to run Cobalt. Educated at Wharton (MBA) and the London School of Economics (MS Economics), she brings a rare mix of Wall Street discipline and deep security product expertise to a company at the intersection of human-led and AI-powered offensive security.
Varun Talwar is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the enterprise service mesh company built on Istio and Envoy. Before Tetrate, he was the founding product manager for both gRPC and Istio at Google — two open-source projects now embedded in the plumbing of the modern internet. He helped stream Felix Baumgartner's 2012 space jump to 8% of all internet traffic, then spent a decade building the connectivity layer that would make that kind of scale routine. Today Tetrate has raised $52.5M and is redefining how AI agents talk to each other securely in production.
Blackpoint Cyber is a Denver-based managed detection and response (MDR) company built by former NSA cyber operations experts who decided the best way to defend businesses was to think like the attackers they used to be. Founded in 2014, the company serves managed service providers (MSPs) with a 24/7 security operations center, proprietary threat detection technology, and its unified CompassOne platform - combining endpoint, identity, cloud, and compliance tools into a single dashboard. With $210M in total funding and 23 G2 badges in Spring 2025, Blackpoint has become one of the most recognized MDR providers in the MSP channel, locking compromised Microsoft 365 accounts roughly every 30 minutes.
Corelight is a San Francisco-based cybersecurity company that pioneered the commercial Open NDR (Network Detection and Response) platform, built on Zeek - the gold-standard open-source network security monitor created by co-founder Dr. Vern Paxson at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. By transforming raw network traffic into high-fidelity, structured logs and pairing them with AI-powered analytics, Corelight gives enterprise security teams and government agencies the evidence they need to detect, investigate, and respond to threats faster. With $309M in total funding, 40%+ ARR growth, and recognition as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for NDR, Corelight is widely regarded as the most trusted platform for network-based threat detection.
Nightfall AI is a San Francisco-based data security company that uses AI-native detection to find and protect sensitive data across SaaS applications, AI tools, and endpoints. It pitches itself as the first DLP and insider risk platform purpose-built for the AI era.
Spin.AI is an AI-powered SaaS security and data-protection company based in Palo Alto. Its SpinOne platform unifies SaaS Security Posture Management, ransomware defense, automated backup and recovery, and browser extension risk control for Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Slack - serving more than 1,500 organizations across 100+ countries.
Dean Drako is a serial entrepreneur and engineer who has founded more than six companies across cybersecurity, cloud video surveillance, physical access control, and electric vehicles. He invented the IT industry's first spam filter appliance at Barracuda Networks, took the company to a NYSE IPO, then turned his restless attention to cloud video security at Eagle Eye Networks and physical access control at Brivo. In December 2025 he merged both into the world's largest AI cloud-native physical security company, assuming the CEO chair at Brivo. He holds 53+ patents and has won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award twice - a feat as rare as his other hobby: co-founding an electric supercar company.
Dhrupad Trivedi is the President, CEO, and Chairman of A10 Networks (NYSE: ATEN), a San Jose-based cybersecurity and application delivery company. With a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA in Finance from Duke's Fuqua School of Business, he brings over 30 years of deep technical and operational expertise across networking, cybersecurity, and telecommunications. Since taking the helm in December 2019, Trivedi has repositioned A10 as an AI-era security company — landing Microsoft as a customer to protect mission-critical generative AI infrastructure — while driving double-digit revenue growth and expanding the company's portfolio to include AI firewalls, DDoS protection, and next-generation web application firewalls.
Gadi Bashvitz is the Co-founder and CEO of Bright Security (formerly NeuraLegion), a San Rafael-based developer-centric Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) platform. A veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces' elite Unit 8200, he brings 25+ years of cybersecurity, product, and go-to-market experience to his mission of making application security accessible to every developer. Under his leadership, Bright Security raised a $20M Series A in 2022 and launched the Bright STAR autonomous security testing and remediation platform at RSA Conference 2025, achieving approximately 85% auto-remediation rates for its customers.