The 10 Coolest Security Startups Of 2015 (So Far)
Standout Security Startups
There's a lot of noise in the security startup space, and investors are funneling literally billions of dollars in the market, hoping to bet on the next big thing. The standouts for CRN for 2015 (so far) include companies that have launched security solutions for containers, applications, endpoint, threat detection and more. That breadth of options and emergence of new innovative technologies will prove key as security continues to be the top challenge for many companies, and for solution providers who look to find answers for those problems for their customers.
Take a look at ten startups that stood out so far this year.
Twistlock
CEO: Ben Bernstein
Security is the greatest pain point facing enterprises tht want to jump on board with the rising popularity of container technology. Twistlock, whose name comes from a term for securing shipping containers in place, helps solve that problem with an offering that allows enterprises to monitor both static and runtime container application activity, establish security baselines prior to production and protect cloud and on-premise containers. While there have been no known high-profile exploits of container technology, it is proven that it is possible so it is only a matter of time as more enterprises adopt the technology, CEO Ben Bernstein said. In May, the company landed $2.5 million in seed funding from Israel-based venture capital company YL Ventures.
Waratek
CEO: Brian Maccaba
Named the "most innovative company" at this year's RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox, Waratek provides large enterprises and institutions with runtime application protection using secure container technology in on-premise or cloud environments. The result is akin to a "bulletproof vest" for applications, CEO Brian Maccaba told CRN, protecting them from both known and unknown flaws in software applications as well as remediating live vulnerabilities. The focus on application-level security is a relatively new trend for the security space that is garnering a lot of interest in the market, particularly in the financial and government sectors, Maccaba said. As the company continues to expand, it said it is looking to boost its investment in expanding its channel program to target more of the Fortune 1000 companies.
Tanium
CEO: David Hindawi
Tanium has been gaining a lot of attention in the security marketplace for its endpoint security and management platform. Most recently, the company landed $52 million from renowned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, adding to the $90 million initially invested by the firm last year. To continue its astronomical growth rate, co-founder and CTO Orion Hindawi said the startup plans to "redouble" its investment in its partners, which currently account for around 90 percent of its total revenue.
LightCyber
CEO: Gonen Fink
So far in 2015, there hasn't been any rest for corporations as they fight back against a continued onslaught of cyberattacks. LightCyber has been gaining some high-profile attention so far this year for its technology, landing investments from key investor Shlomo Kramer, who co-founded Check Point Software Technologies and Imperva and was an early investor in Palo Alto Networks and Trusteer. The company, based in Los Altos, Calif., offers an easy-to-deploy breach detection technology that provides actionable steps to remediate any problems found. The company works with around 15 partners in the U.S. currently, but said it is looking to expand that going forward.
SecurityDo
CEO: Chris Jordan
Another finalist in this year's RSA Innovation Sandbox, SecurityDo's Fluency adds an extra layer of analytics on top of traditional SIEM solutions. The offering uses what it calls "metaflow data," including data from network devices, application-level protocols, URLs and more, to offer a more comprehensive view of an attack. The offering is less geared toward breach detection and more tailored to help security professionals understand and respond to advanced persistent threats. Speed is important in case of a breach, and SecurityDo claims to be 2,000 times faster than traditional relational databases and 160 times faster than a NoSQL database, meaning it can analyze 20,000 malicious IPs in less than a minute.
Menlo Security
CEO: Amir Ben-Efraim
Emerging from stealth earlier this year, Menlo Security offers what it says is a new take on email and Web security. The company's Isolation Platform works by isolating all Web and email content in the cloud before it reaches the endpoint. From there, end users are able to view a mirror presentation of the information, without actually touching it. CEO Amir Ben-Efraim said the "magic" of the offering is that it isolates all content instead of categorizing it as good or bad, so the user is protected either way.
"The concept of trying to figure out good from bad is failing us as an industry," Ben-Efraim said. "Even though we've got more and more layers of security ... they're [security companies] all trying to figure out good from bad. Largely speaking, they're all failing. We wanted to try a different approach."
Cybereason
CEO: Lior Div
As security software company Websense announced its $1.9 billion acquisition by defense contractor Raytheon, its competitor Cybereason stepped up to the plate, annoucing $25 million in Series B funding and a new partnership with Lockheed Martin. Founded in 2012 by former members of the Unit 8200, Israel's equivalent to the NSA, the Cambridge, Mass.-based company provides real-time threat detection capabilities that track an attack's root cause, timeline, endpoints affected and the tools behind the attack. For clients, that means full visibility into the life cycle and magnitude of an attack, CEO Lior Div told CRN, calling the offering a "super analyst in a box." The company said it is investing in expanding its partner base, including adding direct sales people to enable partners and investing in R&D to make the product simpler to use.
Palerra
CEO: Rohit Gupta
Security startup Palerra is red hot so far this year, landing $17 million in funding and lots of praise from partners and analysts alike for its cloud security automation platform. The company was also named a "Cool Vendor" by Gartner this year in the area of risk management. The LORIC security platform aims to help enterprises automate the process of threat detection, incident response, analytics and more around cloud and SaaS offerings. That type of technology is particularly important as businesses move to more of a threat detection model, than one based around threat prevention. The company said it is actively building out its channel partner program, expecting to launch a formal program in the near future.
Checkmarx
CEO: Emmanuel Benzaquen
Checkmarx offers a solution that helps application companies build in security best practices from the get-go. The solution, called CxSAST, uses artificial intelligence replication of code to let software developers make sure their projects are clean of vulnerabilities and backdoors before launch. The company recently announced $84 million in Series D funding in June, let by Insight Ventures. The Greenwood Village, Colo.-based company's more than 100 percent year over year growth comes as exploitations in application security rise and developers are becoming more aware of the importance of building in security at the application layer as a best practice.
BitSight
CEO: Shaun McConnon
As mega breaches continue to hit the marketplace, companies want to know if they will be next. BitSight provides a technology that allows businesses to get a security rating score, similar to a credit score or a Moody's rating, to find out the performance of their own internal systems, as well as those of their peers, competitors and possible acquisition targets, using publicly accessible threat intelligence, data hygiene and disclosures. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company has been on a growth tear, tripling its year over year revenue and landing $23 million in Series B funding in June. The company said it is looking to aggressively grow its channel program from 10 percent of its revenue to 40 percent by the end of the year and sees a huge opportunity for partners to use the rating technology to drive security sales with clients.