💰 Security, Funded #126 - 2024's Bold Beginnings

Hey there,

Happy Tuesday, and I hope you had a great weekend! In this issue, we’ve got:

• 🏆️ More record-breaking M&A

• 💪 2024’s small but mighty start

• 📊 2023’s disruption and resilience

Yesterday I published my 2023 annual report on the cybersecurity market titled ‘A Year of Disruption and Resilience: The Cybersecurity Market in 2023’.

My goal with creating reports like this is to go as deep as possible and pull out trends and insights that you won’t find elsewhere but still keep it in a consumable format for people to read.

I’d love it if you’d read it, share it, and let me know what you think!

Also me

Onward to this week's issue.

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Last issue’s vibe check:
Will the cyber IPO market unthaw this year?

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🥶 Nope (24)
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨 🔥 Yep (23)
47 Votes

This was the closest poll I’ve had to date! While some are just hoping for the best, others don’t see any crack in the Cyber IPO Winter. Some of the top comments from the naysayers were:

“Valuations [for] public/private [is] still disconnected”

“It feels like we are in a deeper, more protracted downturn than we've been in for a while. I think the numbers on IPOs will need to be staggering to get the investors ready. Much more likely to exit through acquisition.”

📸 YoY Snapshot

A rolling 12-week chart to compare funding and acquisitions each week in a year-over-year (YoY) view between 2023 and 2024.

As this is a new year, this chart will be building over the next 12 weeks and then roll forward.

Although 2024 is starting out slowly on the volume and money font (as most years do), last week’s total amount raised was up over 50% compared to 2023 at the same time.

Acquisitions to start off the year are moving at the same clip as 2023 but are already setting new records with the second most expensive acquisition in cybersecurity market history (see below).

💰 Market Summary

• 5 companies raised $165.7M across 5 unique product categories

• 3 companies were acquired or had a merger event across 3 unique product categories

🧩 Funding By Product Category

• $100.0M for Network Detection and Response (NDR) across 1 deal

• $39.9M for Data Protection across 1 deal

• $25.0M for Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) across 1 deal

• $875.8K for Bug Bounty across 1 deal

• An undisclosed amount for Identity and Access Management (IAM) across 1 deal

🏢 Funding By Company

• ExtraHop Networks, a United States-based network detection and response (NDR) platform, raised a $100.0M Venture Round. (more)

• Keepit, a Denmark-based cloud and SaaS data backup and protection platform, raised a $40.0M Debt Financing from HSBC Innovation Banking and The Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO). (more)

• Anecdotes, a United States-based governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) platform, raised a $25.0M Series B from Glilot Capital Partners. (more)

• AuditOne, a Germany-based auditing and bug bounty platform for decentralized and Web3 applications, raised a $875.8K Seed from High-Tech Grunderfonds. (more)

• Block-Auth, a Spain-based blockchain-based digital identity authentication platform, raised an undisclosed Seed.

🌎 Funding By Country

• $125.0M for the United States across 2 deals

• $39.9M for Denmark across 1 deal

• $875.8K for Germany across 1 deal

• An undisclosed amount for Spain across 1 deal

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

• Juniper Networks, a United States-based suite of network security tools, was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $14.0B. (more) <-Second largest M&A for a cyber company

• Authomize, an Israel-based automated access and authorization governance platform, was acquired by Delinea for an undisclosed amount. (more)

• Falcon Risk Services, a United States-based cyber risk insurance underwriter, was acquired by HDI for an undisclosed amount. (more)

📚 Great Reads

• AI's Role in Security Efficiency - Kubernetes Edition - The Cloud Security Podcast team, Ashish Rajan and Shilpi Bhattacharjee, talk about security with the team at Shopify on the intersection of AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), and Kubernetes security.

• AI: The Coming Revolution - Coatue Management reflects on the rapid adoption of AI, paralleling the influence of the Internet and mobile on the economy.

• CloudSecGPT: Your Go-To AI for Cloud Security Insights - Custom GPTs are all the rage now, and Marco Lancini has created a cloud security-focused GPT by uploading all of the content of his excellent CloudSecDocs.com.

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🧪 Labs

2024 vibes