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  • 💰 Security, Funded #98 - AI's Rise, Cyber Gains, Balance in Chains

💰 Security, Funded #98 - AI's Rise, Cyber Gains, Balance in Chains

A review of cybersecurity funding and industry news from the week of June 12th, 2023.

Author

Mike Privette
June 20, 2023 • Reading Time: 11 minutes

Hey there,

Happy Tuesday, and I hope you had a great weekend!

🏃‍♂️ The Rundown

A meta roundup of all the important things affecting cybersecurity and the macroenvironment:

  • AI propels cybersecurity investments

  • Cyber earnings: a lull period

  • Cyber insurers' profitability skyrockets

  • $78.4M raised, $176.0M in acquisitions

  • AI tricks and traps

  • Life / Work balance (not the other way around)

  • Emphasizing supply chain cybersecurity

We’ve reached a tipping point where cyber investment meets generative AI. As you’ll see from some of the companies below, new companies are coming out of stealth and hitting the marketing or pivoting into launching AI-based, AI-supported, AI-enabled, or security of AI/ML cybersecurity products.

I expect this to be a continued trend through the rest of the year. This will continue to be exacerbated by continued geopolitical risks, and an area I think will see the earliest adoption from buyers will be in the Threat Intelligence, Threat & Vulnerability Management (TVM), and Application Security spaces. These spaces will give the most obvious and tangible benefit in creating more secure code and finding and stopping threats.

🏰 Housekeeping Update

You may notice a new look and feel if you’re reading this on the blog today. That’s because last week, I migrated everything over to Beehiiv from Ghost and consolidated domains to streamline my blog and newsletter operations.

There might be a few broken links here and there on the older posts, but I’m working through them. I would much appreciate it if you send any broken links my way if you find one. If you’re just reading this via email, there should be no changes, as I’ve been using Beehiiv to send this newsletter every week for over a year.

Onward to this week's issue.

🗣Sponsor

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🔮 Earnings Reports

A section for notable earnings reports from public cybersecurity companies, be they “pure play” or hybrid companies:

No public earnings calls from last week to report on. 🫡

🛞 Industry News Roundup

  • Cyber insurers got a lot more profitable in 2022 (more)

  • EU Pushes to Remove 'High-Risk' Chinese Suppliers (more)

  • UK provides £25M cyber defenses to Ukraine (more)

📅 YTD Funding

A rolling 12-week chart to compare funding each week between 2022 and 2023.

Funding week over week in 2023 remains significantly lower than in 2022. In the second to last week of Q2 2023, short of a blowout week next week, Q2 2023 will end up at ~45% down from Q2 2022.

💰 Funding Summary

  • 8 companies raised $78.4M across 6 unique product categories

  • 3 companies were acquired or had a merger event across 2 unique product categories for $176.0M

🧩 Funding By Product Category

  • $35.4M for Threat Intelligence across 3 deals

  • $25.0M for Software Composition Analysis (SCA) across 2 deals

  • $15.0M for Trust & Safety across 1 deal

  • $1.7M for Email Security across 1 deal

  • $1.3M for Fraud and Financial Crime Protection across 1 deal

  • An undisclosed amount for Cyber Insurance across 1 deal

🏢 Funding By Company

🌎 Funding By Country

  • $46.3M for United States across 5 deals 🇺🇸

  • $25.0M for Israel across 2 deals 🇮🇱

  • $5.4M for France across 1 deal 🇫🇷

  • $1.7M for Ireland across 1 deal 🇮🇪

🗣Sponsor

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🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

📚 Great Reads

  • Good Practices for Supply Chain Cybersecurity - The report provides an overview of the current supply chain cybersecurity practices followed by essential and important entities in the EU, based on the results of a 2022 ENISA study that focused on investments of cybersecurity budgets among organizations in the EU.

  • Work / Life Balance - Phil Venables, Google Cloud CISO, shares his struggles and success with balancing work and life in the cybersecurity field.

  • AI Canaries - Daniel Miessler dives in on the concept of leaving traps for overly-ambitious AI agents.

🧪 Labs

Things are about to get pretty wild 😳

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