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.
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.
Zscaler is a cloud-native cybersecurity company that pioneered the zero trust security model for enterprises. Its Zero Trust Exchange platform connects users, devices, and applications directly and securely over the internet - inspecting traffic in the cloud rather than backhauling it through legacy hardware appliances. Founded in 2007 and publicly traded on NASDAQ as ZS, Zscaler processes hundreds of billions of transactions daily for thousands of large organizations, and has expanded into AI-driven security operations, data protection, and digital experience monitoring.
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.
VIA (VIA Science, Inc.) is a Somerville, Massachusetts Web3 company building a decentralized, quantum-resistant, passwordless platform that lets governments and enterprises share and analyze sensitive data without exposing it. Backed by 18 issued patents, VIA is the first blockchain application to earn U.S. Department of Defense-wide cybersecurity accreditation, and its tools protect data and identities for the DoD, Fortune 100 firms, and energy utilities worldwide.
Venn is a New York cybersecurity company that secures remote and hybrid work on personal, unmanaged, or contractor-owned computers. Its patented Blue Border technology installs a lightweight agent that creates a company-controlled Secure Enclave on any Windows or Mac machine - work apps run locally inside a literal blue border where data is encrypted and isolated from personal use, with no virtual desktop, no remote session, and no shipped laptop required.

AJ Herrera is the VP of Corporate Marketing at Cloudflare, where he leads the brand narrative that recast a CDN company into the world's connectivity cloud. With over 30 years in high-tech marketing spanning Silicon Graphics, a decade running his own agency, and seven years shaping VMware's global brand, he brings both the craftsman's instinct and the operator's eye to one of the internet's most consequential infrastructure companies.
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.
Raji Dani is VP & Deputy CISO for Microsoft Business, overseeing cybersecurity across Microsoft's Customer & Partner, Finance, and Marketing divisions. With over 25 years in technology and product engineering, she joined Microsoft in 2006 and built her career through Office 365 security, identity and access management, and cloud security leadership. She is a recognized voice on securing customer support ecosystems and preventing lateral movement attacks, with published guidance and RSA Conference appearances to her name.
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.
Jay Chaudhry is the founder, chairman and CEO of Zscaler, the cloud security company he started in 2007 to replace corporate firewalls with a zero trust internet exchange. A serial founder of five security companies before Zscaler, he took the company public in 2018 and built it into a multi-billion-dollar pillar of the cybersecurity industry.
Menlo Security is a Mountain View-based cybersecurity company that pioneered cloud-based remote browser isolation and now sells a Secure Enterprise Browser used by global banks, governments and Fortune 500s to keep web-based malware, phishing and AI-era threats off employee endpoints.
Amitabh Sinha is the Co-Founder of Workspot, Inc., a cloud PC and virtual desktop infrastructure company based in Campbell, California. After earning a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he built a career across Oracle, Informix, and Citrix - where he ran the XenDesktop product line as VP of Product Management - before co-founding Workspot in 2012 with Puneet Chawla and Ty Wang. He served as CEO for over a decade, steering the company through five funding rounds to $86.75M in total capital raised, and pioneering innovations like the industry's first cloud PC with 99.99% SLA availability. In April 2024, he transitioned to Chief Strategy Officer.
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.
Ev Kontsevoy is the co-founder and CEO of Teleport, a cybersecurity company building the identity-native infrastructure access platform trusted by organizations like Samsung, NASDAQ, and IBM. A serial entrepreneur who grew up in Siberia and studied applied mathematics, he previously co-founded Mailgun (acquired by Rackspace in 2012) before starting Teleport in 2015 to eliminate the fragmented, secrets-based approach to infrastructure security. Under his leadership, Teleport reached a $1.1B valuation with its $110M Series C, and he authored an O'Reilly book on identity-native infrastructure access management. He is now focused on defining agentic identity frameworks for the era of AI-driven enterprise infrastructure.
Jeyappragash 'JJ' Jeyakeerthi is the co-founder and CTO of Tetrate, the company that made Istio enterprise-ready and brought FIPS-verified service mesh to regulated industries including the US federal government. An IIT Madras graduate who once ran Twitter's Cloud Infrastructure, JJ co-founded Tetrate in 2018 with Varun Talwar to secure the cloud-native stack from edge to datacenter - building one of the most technically credible teams in the service mesh ecosystem, trusted by the US Air Force and some of the world's largest enterprises.
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.
Teleport is the infrastructure identity company. Its open-source Access Platform replaces shared secrets, VPNs, and long-lived credentials with short-lived cryptographic identities for humans, machines, and AI agents accessing servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, applications, and Windows desktops.
Tetrate is the application networking and security company founded by the creators of Istio and Envoy. It sells enterprise-grade service mesh, zero-trust connectivity, and - more recently - an AI gateway and agent router that lets enterprises run, route, govern and pay for traffic across many large language models from a single control plane.
Tigera is the creator of Calico, the open-source standard for Kubernetes networking and security that powers more than a million clusters every day. From its San Jose headquarters, the company sells Calico Cloud and Calico Enterprise - SaaS and on-prem platforms that bolt active runtime security, zero-trust microsegmentation, and observability onto container environments at any scale.
Workspot is a cloud-native platform that delivers Windows and Linux desktops, apps, and GPU workstations as a service across Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Built for enterprises moving away from legacy VDI, it lets IT teams provision a global cloud PC fleet in days rather than months.
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.
Material Security is a San Francisco cloud workspace security company that protects email, files, and accounts inside Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Founded in 2017 by three ex-Dropbox engineers, it assumes attackers will eventually get in - and locks down the sensitive data they came for, instead of stacking yet another perimeter.
Joe Eandi is a General Partner and Co-Founder of Cyber Mentor Fund, a mentorship-driven early-stage venture fund exclusively focused on cybersecurity startups. A former attorney turned tech executive turned founder turned investor, Eandi brings an unusually wide arc to his work: he started as a corporate lawyer at Wilson Sonsini, served as General Counsel at Inktomi through its Yahoo acquisition, spent seven years as SVP and GM at LiveOps, founded and ran BrightPoint Security (acquired by ServiceNow in 2016), and then co-founded Cyber Mentor Fund in 2018 alongside Tim Eades. CMF deploys $100K-$5M from pre-seed through Series A into cybersecurity startups, with over 35 portfolio companies, three unicorns, and four successful exits including Okera (Databricks), Revelstoke (Arctic Wolf), Message Control (Mimecast), and LeakSignal (F5).
Barry Mainz is the CEO of Forescout Technologies, a San Jose-based cybersecurity company specializing in device visibility, OT/IoT security, and network access control. With over 30 years of executive leadership across infrastructure software and cybersecurity, he previously served as CEO of MobileIron, COO of Malwarebytes, and President of Wind River Systems (Intel). At Forescout, Mainz has driven the company to record growth, including a 20% increase in new recurring bookings and 38% DoD business expansion in 2024, while positioning the platform as the leading solution for cyber resilience across converging IT, OT, and IoT environments. He also sits on the Board of Directors of BlackBerry.
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.
Jim Dolce is CEO and Chairman of Lookout, a cloud security company he has led since 2014. A four-time founder with deep roots in networking and enterprise security, Dolce built his career through a series of acquisitions - from Cascade Communications to Redstone Communications, Unisphere Networks (acquired by Juniper Networks for $500M), and Verivue (acquired by Akamai). Under his leadership, Lookout pivoted from a consumer mobile security app to a pure-play enterprise Security Service Edge platform, making the landmark CipherCloud acquisition in 2021 and divesting its consumer business in 2023 to sharpen focus on enterprise and government customers.