Knox Systems is an Austin, Texas company that operates a pre-authorized, AI-managed federal cloud so that commercial SaaS vendors can reach FedRAMP authorization in roughly 90 days for about 90% less than the traditional cost. By running a shared, continuously monitored compliance boundary across AWS, Azure, and GCP, Knox lets customer applications inherit 60-80% of required security controls on day one, then automates evidence collection, documentation, and remediation. Founded in 2023 by Irina Denisenko, the company raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 and serves vendors such as Adobe, Celonis, OutSystems, Armis, and BigID across 15+ federal agency authorizations.
Irina Denisenko is the co-founder and CEO of Knox Systems, an Austin-based cybersecurity company that delivers 'FedRAMP as a Service' to help commercial software vendors get authorized to sell to the U.S. government in roughly 90 days instead of years. She started Knox in 2023 after living through the FedRAMP bottleneck herself as COO of Class Technologies, where she scaled the company to $50M in ARR. A repeat operator who also helped build drone company PrecisionHawk, Denisenko positions Knox as a challenger to Palantir's FedStart, backed by Felicis Ventures and roughly $31.5M in total funding.
AutoRABIT is an enterprise DevSecOps and release-management platform built for the Salesforce ecosystem. It combines CI/CD automation (ARM), static code and security analysis (CodeScan), data and metadata backup and recovery (Vault), and security posture management (Guard) so teams in regulated industries - banking, financial services, healthcare, and government - can ship Salesforce changes quickly while keeping security and compliance intact. Founded in 2015 and bootstrapped for its first five years, the company is headquartered in San Francisco and serves customers including ABN AMRO, Cigna, and CyberArk.
ID.me is a McLean, Virginia-based digital identity network that lets people prove who they are online once and reuse that verified credential across government agencies, healthcare portals, and retail discount programs. Founded in 2010 as a military discount site, it evolved into a NIST-certified identity wallet used by well over 150 million Americans, and it is one of the primary identity-verification vendors for U.S. federal agencies including the IRS, the VA, and the Social Security Administration.
Trustero is a Palo Alto AI company building software for security and compliance teams. Founded in 2020 by SignalFx co-founder Phillip Liu, it applies generative AI and a patent-pending 'Trust Graph' to automate the grind of governance, risk and compliance (GRC): gap analysis, evidence collection, control testing, security questionnaires, third-party risk reviews and audit prep across frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, PCI, SOX and DORA. In November 2024 it raised a $10.35M Series A led by Bright Pixel Capital.
Hirsch Group (formerly Vitaprotech Group) is a France-based provider of premium, integrated physical-security systems for sensitive and high-security sites. Built by rolling up specialist companies - perimeter-intrusion pioneer Sorhea, access-control firm TIL Technologies, video-analytics maker Foxstream, UK detection specialist Harper Chalice, and others - it made its biggest leap in 2024 by acquiring the security business of U.S. firm Identiv for about $145 million, which brought the iconic Hirsch access-control brand into the fold. In 2026 the whole group unified under a single name, Hirsch, spanning command-and-control (PSIM), access control, video intelligence, credentials, door readers, and perimeter protection, with roughly $185M in revenue and 700+ employees.
Delve is a San Francisco AI startup that automates regulatory compliance. Its AI agents collect evidence, scan code and infrastructure, autofill security questionnaires, and prepare audits for frameworks like SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and FedRAMP - turning a process that traditionally takes months into days. Founded in 2023 by MIT students Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, the company raised a $32M Series A led by Insight Partners in 2025 at a reported $300M valuation, and says it serves more than 1,500 fast-growing companies.
GovDash is an AI-native platform that helps companies win and run U.S. government contracts. It pulls capture, proposal writing, contract management, and post-award delivery into one system of record, powered by an AI agent named Dash. Founded in 2022 and backed by Y Combinator, GovDash says its customers won more than $5 billion in government work in 2025, sometimes turning proposals around in as little as 24 hours.
H2O.ai is a Mountain View-based AI cloud company founded in 2012, on a mission to democratize artificial intelligence for everyone. The company offers a converged platform spanning predictive and generative AI - from its open-source H2O-3 machine learning framework to enterprise products like Driverless AI, h2oGPTe, and the H2O AI Cloud. Trusted by over 20,000 organizations including more than half the Fortune 500, H2O.ai is known for employing the world's largest team of Kaggle Grandmasters and for pioneering automated machine learning. With $246 million in total funding at a $1.7 billion valuation, the company serves industries from financial services and healthcare to government and telecommunications, delivering AI that organizations can deploy on their own terms - on-premises, in the cloud, or in air-gapped environments.

Mehran Farimani is the co-founder and CEO of RapidFort, a Sunnyvale-based software supply chain security company that raised a $42M Series A in February 2026. A 25-year technology veteran, Mehran previously led the Fiery division at Electronics for Imaging (EFI) as SVP & GM, then founded Percipo—a computer vision AI company whose technology reached 40,000+ retail locations. At RapidFort, he is pioneering the category of Software Attack Surface Management (SASM), helping organizations automatically harden container images and eliminate up to 80% of CVEs through runtime-aware profiling, without touching a single line of application code.
RapidFort is a Sunnyvale-based software supply chain security company that automatically hardens container images, strips unused components, and ships a library of curated near-zero-CVE images so engineering teams can ship secure software without rewriting it.
Spectro Cloud is a San Jose-based enterprise software company that builds Palette, a Kubernetes management platform used to run, secure and scale containerized workloads, AI infrastructure and GPU clusters across cloud, data center, bare metal and edge environments. Founded in 2019 by Cisco/Cliqr veterans, it counts GE HealthCare, T-Mobile, Nokia and the U.S. Air Force and Navy among its customers and closed a $75M Series C in November 2024 led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs.
Sri Satish Ambati is the CEO and Co-founder of H2O.ai, the company behind the world's most widely used open-source machine learning platform. Since founding H2O.ai in 2012 with a mission to 'democratize AI for anyone, anywhere,' he has built it into a $1.7B enterprise AI platform serving over 20,000 organizations including more than half the Fortune 500. A serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Platfora (acquired by Workday), Sri bridges academic neuroscience research - via sabbaticals at Stanford and UC Berkeley - with industrial-scale AI deployment. Under his leadership H2O.ai has advanced from AutoML pioneer to generative AI powerhouse, with h2oGPTe ranked #1 on the GAIA leaderboard and the company recognized as a Visionary in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud AI Developer Services.
Peregrine is a San Francisco-based data intelligence platform that unifies fragmented public safety data - from body-worn cameras and CAD records to RMS and ALPR feeds - into a single, searchable system for law enforcement, fire-rescue, EMS, and emergency management agencies. Founded in 2018 by ex-Palantir operators, it now serves jurisdictions covering more than 80 million Americans and reached a $2.5B valuation after a $190M Series C led by Sequoia in March 2025.

Chris Hughes is a U.S. Air Force veteran, co-founder and president of Aquia Inc., VP of Security Strategy at Zenity, and the founder of Resilient Cyber - a cybersecurity newsletter and podcast with 31,000+ subscribers. A three-time Wiley/Springer author, inaugural CISA Cyber Innovation Fellow, and adjunct professor at two universities, Hughes has become one of the most influential voices on software supply chain security, vulnerability management, and agentic AI security.