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Checkmarx Built the Scanner. Now It Wants to Kill the Security Backlog.
The 20-year-old AppSec company made its name finding vulnerable code. Its harder second act is making the findings useful before AI-assisted development turns every security queue into a landfill.
Bright Built a Scanner That Was Too Dangerous to Use - Then Turned the Failure Into a Developer Security Business
Bright began with an AI fuzzer that found zero-days and occasionally flattened the target. Its second act is less theatrical and more useful: prove the vulnerability, help fix it, and test the fix before the code ships.
Appknox
Most security tools inspect the code developers write. Appknox follows the app that users actually touch - from compiled binary and real-device behavior to the moment a counterfeit copy appears in an app store.
MindFort
MindFort is a San Francisco AI security lab building autonomous agents that continuously find, validate, and patch vulnerabilities in web applications and APIs. Founded out of Y Combinator's X25 batch by offensive-security veterans, it runs like a 24/7 AI red team - proving exploits in isolated runtime environments before it reports them, then opening pull requests with the fix. The company raised a $3M+ seed led by Soma Capital in April 2026.
Mend.io
Mend.io, formerly WhiteSource, is a Boston- and Tel Aviv-based application security company that helps development and security teams find and fix vulnerabilities in open source dependencies, custom code, and AI-generated code. Its platform spans software composition analysis (SCA), static and dynamic testing (SAST/DAST), API security, automated dependency updates via Renovate, and a growing suite of AI security tools. Serving more than 1,000 customers including a quarter of the Fortune 100, Mend.io emphasizes automated remediation - producing exact code fixes rather than long lists of alerts - to help teams reduce security debt without slowing delivery.
Cobalt
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.