security-automation
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Anuj Goel and the Last Mile of Cyber Defense
At Citi, he watched valuable threat intelligence stall between teams and tools. Cyware is his attempt to close that stubborn gap between knowing and doing.
The Security Scanner’s Most Awkward Question: Who Actually Fixes This?
Scanners became very good at finding vulnerabilities. Cogent raised $53 million on the premise that the valuable part begins one minute later - when somebody has to decide what matters, persuade an owner to fix it, and prove the danger is gone.
The Machine That Swallowed the Security Desk
Cortex began with a simple annoyance: every security tool could raise an alarm, but none could run the whole response. Palo Alto Networks turned that missing workflow into a bid to rebuild the security operations center around data, automation and machines that do the first shift.
The Security Scanner That Let Everyone Write the Alarm
ProjectDiscovery made vulnerability checks readable, remixable and free. Then it discovered the harder problem: somebody still had to run the machinery, judge the evidence and carry the fix across the company.
Fortra Bought a Cybersecurity Arsenal. Now It Has to Make the Pieces Talk.
The company once helped operators run overnight jobs on IBM machines. Four decades and a long acquisition spree later, it is trying to turn a cabinet of famous security tools into one coherent defense - while learning what happens when one trusted product becomes the way in.
Axonius Bet Every Security Team Had the Same Blind Spot - Then Turned Inventory Into a $200 Million ARR Business
The clever part was not finding one more signal. It was making hundreds of tools compare notes - and turning the discrepancies into a product security teams could act on.
ReliaQuest’s $600,000 Bet: Keep Your Security Stack, Fix the Mess Above It
Most security vendors want a bigger slice of the stack. ReliaQuest built a $3.4 billion company by leaving the stack in place - then charging enterprises to make the pieces behave like one system.
Hive Pro Wants Security Teams to Fix the 1% That Matters - Not Admire the Other 99%
Most security teams do not suffer from too little vulnerability data. They suffer from a queue that never ends. Hive Pro is selling a way to turn that backlog into a short, defensible list of fixes.
Don Jeter Put a Monster Truck in the Cybersecurity Machine
In a trade-show world of blue gradients and careful claims, Torq's CMO chose skeletons, tattoos and Grave Digger. Beneath the spectacle is a practical playbook for making enterprise software memorable - and accountable to revenue.
Cynet’s Bet: Sell the SOC, Not Just the Software
Small and midsize companies are told to buy enterprise-grade cyber defense, then handed an enterprise-sized assembly problem. Cynet’s answer is one platform, one agent and a human security team that stays awake after the customer goes home.
FireMon Built a Business Cleaning Up the Firewall Rules Nobody Wants to Touch
Every enterprise wants zero trust. First, someone has to explain the 10-year-old firewall rule labeled “temporary.” FireMon sells the control plane for that unglamorous, expensive job.
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.
Amir Khayat Spent a Decade Learning to See What Security Teams Miss
Before Amir Khayat built Vorlon, he moved from code to customers to the machinery between them. His bet is that the next security fight lives inside the connections businesses barely see.
Marina Segal Is Making Cloud Security Finish the Job
Cloud security learned to find every loose screw. The Seattle founder behind Tamnoon is building the careful, context-rich machinery that actually turns the wrench.
Steve Carter Turned Vulnerability Chaos Into a Company
Before Nucleus Security became an enterprise platform, it was a working answer to a federal problem: too many findings, too many handoffs, and too little time. Steve Carter has spent his career closing that gap between knowing and doing.
BluB0X Put the Security Desk in the Cloud - Now It Wants AI to Run the Building
The Andover company rebuilt doors, cameras, turnstiles and elevators as one cloud service. Its bet is that the winning security system will own less hardware, share more context and tell operators what happened before they ask.
Grip Security Wants to Find the SaaS Accounts Nobody Approved - Before an Attacker Does
Employees can adopt an app in minutes; security teams may need months to notice. Grip built a business around closing that gap - and around turning an unruly SaaS inventory into actions a small team can actually finish.
The Company Betting That Scanning Was Never the Hard Part
Every enterprise already owns a dozen scanners that find problems. Nucleus Security built a business on the boring, unglamorous job nobody else wanted: figuring out which of the millions of findings actually matter.
Brooke Motta Built a Security Company From a Hike - Then Taught It to Watch Behavior
A career spent selling security taught Brooke Motta to listen for the gap between a new technology and the tools meant to protect it. RAD Security began on a Flagstaff trail and now follows behavior across cloud workloads and AI agents.
Expel
Expel built the security service its founders once wished they could buy: one that keeps the tools, loses the alert pile, and shows its work. A decade in, its hardest product may be trust itself.
Compyl
Compyl is a New York-based SaaS company that unifies governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) on a single platform. Founded in 2020 by former CISOs, it pulls evidence directly from more than 125 integrated systems, maps controls across 70+ frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA, and uses agentic AI to draft evidence, score vendors and answer security questionnaires while keeping humans in control of decisions. Compyl raised a $12M Series A in June 2025 to scale its AI-led platform for mid-market and enterprise security teams.
Praetorian
Praetorian is an Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity company that helps organizations prevent breaches by combining an adversarial, offensive-security mindset with automation and AI. Founded in 2010 by CEO Nathan Sportsman, the firm pairs elite red-team engineers with its flagship Chariot platform for Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and attack surface management, plus services spanning penetration testing, cloud and product security, and adversarial emulation. Its clients include large technology, finance, healthcare, and automotive organizations, and it maintains open-source tools such as the Nosey Parker secrets scanner.
CyFlare
CyFlare is a U.S.-based Managed Security Service Provider that runs cybersecurity operations on behalf of MSPs, resellers and technology vendors. Through its CyFlare ONE platform and a 24/7 Open-XDR-enabled Security Operations Center, the company delivers managed detection and response, managed EDR, XDR, vulnerability management, managed email security and compliance support, letting channel partners offer enterprise-grade security to their clients without building an in-house SOC.
depthfirst
depthfirst is a San Francisco applied AI lab building an AI-native security platform that detects, triages and remediates software vulnerabilities before attackers can exploit them. Its 'General Security Intelligence' uses custom AI agents and purpose-trained security models to read a company's code, business logic and infrastructure, surfacing more true-positive vulnerabilities while cutting false positives and delivering developer-ready fixes. Founded in 2024 by leaders from Databricks, Google DeepMind and Faire, the company raised $120M across Series A and B within a few months of leaving stealth.
Radiant Security
Radiant Security builds an adaptive, agentic AI SOC platform that triages, investigates, and helps respond to every security alert a team receives - regardless of source, complexity, or novelty. Founded in 2021 by security veterans Shahar Ben-Hador and Barry Shteiman, the company aims to cut the alert noise that overwhelms security operations centers, escalating only real threats to human analysts and reducing analyst workload by up to 98%. It also folds in integrated log management to cut SIEM storage costs.
Amplifier Security
Amplifier Security is an AI-native workforce security company that turns the noisy gap between finding and fixing security problems into an automated, employee-friendly workflow. Its agentic platform builds a per-employee Human Risk Graph, then deploys AI agents that engage workers directly in Slack, Teams and the browser to remediate device, app, identity and behavior risks - with humans kept in the loop. Founded in 2023 by Shreyas Sadalgi (CEO) and Tommy Donnelly (CTO), the company has raised roughly $9M and counts security-industry founders and CISOs among its backers and early customers.
Shreyas Sadalgi
Shreyas Sadalgi is the co-founder and CEO of Amplifier Security, an Atlanta- and San Francisco-rooted startup building AI, human-in-the-loop automation that turns employees from security liabilities into active defenders. After two decades in enterprise security strategy and business development at companies like Centrify and BetterCloud, he teamed up with three-time CISO Tommy Donnelly to tackle security's 'last mile' problem: the gap between what security policy says and what busy humans actually do. Amplifier has raised roughly $9 million, including a $5.6M seed round led by TechOperators in 2025.
Billy Gouveia
Billy Gouveia is the founder and CEO of Surefire Cyber, a Maryland-based incident response firm that helps cyber insurers, brokers, law firms, and organizations prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents like ransomware, business email compromise, and data theft. A former U.S. Army intelligence officer and Columbia and Georgetown graduate, he spent years in national security and enterprise risk consulting before incubating Surefire Cyber inside Forgepoint Capital and launching it in 2022 with $10 million in Series A funding. His pitch: combine automation with human expertise to deliver faster, calmer response when companies are under attack.
Illumio
Illumio is a Sunnyvale-based cybersecurity company that pioneered Zero Trust Segmentation. Its Breach Containment Platform - Illumio Segmentation plus the AI-powered Illumio Insights - assumes attackers will get in and focuses on stopping them from spreading. By mapping how applications talk to each other across data centers, public clouds, and endpoints, Illumio lets organizations isolate workloads and contain ransomware and breaches before they become disasters.
Joe Morin
Joe Morin is the Founder and CEO of CyFlare, a top-ranked managed security operations company he built from the ground up in 2017. With over 20 years in cybersecurity, Morin spent years in sales engineering and alliance roles at companies like Zscaler, Forcepoint, and Barracuda Networks before channeling that cross-vendor perspective into CyFlare's signature philosophy: don't pick one platform, wire them all together. Under his leadership, CyFlare achieved 854% growth over three years, landed on the Inc. 5000 list twice, ranked #5 on CRN's 2025 Fast Growth 150, and is consistently recognized as a Top 20 Global MSSP. His LinkedIn handle - cyberbatman - says a lot about the man.