Consistent with the past year, the 2021 RSAC Innovation Sandbox Contest was full of ‘unprecedented’ firsts.
We had the largest number of qualified entries ever submitted. The submissions came from five of the seven continents, making this pool of entries the most global we’ve ever reviewed. And the submissions were strong, demonstrated by the fact that more than 60% the companies who submitted made it to the second round. The judges were extremely challenged to come up with only ten companies to participate as finalists. Based on the submissions alone, I can promise this is going to be an amazing ISB Contest. I also had a chance to interview Security Researcher and Entrepreneur and ISB judge, Paul Kocher, regarding his thoughts on the submission trends compared to previous years.
The Top 10 Finalists are young and many are well funded. All of the Top 10 were founded in 2018 or later.
Here are some stats:
Considering how young they are, most are well funded and into their second, third or even C round of funding. One might mistakenly presume that the company that has received the most funding would have been the one founded in 2018, but no, it is the youngest company, founded in January 2020 that has raised the most amount of money. Collectively, these companies have already raised over $486M dollars; yep that’s with an M for million. Also surprising is that the venture funding for these organizations come from over 20 unique firms including Forge Point, Greylock, Ten Eleven Ventures, YL Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Menlo Ventures, Cyberstarts, and more.
Dino Boukouris, Managing Director at Momentum Cyber, explained, "While 2020 has been a challenging year for many companies, the volume of cybersecurity financings actually increased by more than 20% relative to 2019, with no slowdown in sight. We've already seen a steady stream of large rounds of funding with eye-popping valuations to kick off the year; expect those to continue through the remainder of 2021 (and beyond)."
The Finalists’ HQ are based all across the US in New York, Boston, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Boulder. And three of the companies are based in Israel, demonstrating again their deep bench of great companies innovating in cybersecurity.
The companies’ solutions are as different as their names and founders. As Niloo Razi Howe stated in an interview at the opening of the submission period, “We need to bring new ideas into the fight. We need innovations and startups.” And our Top 10 certainly demonstrate that. You will hear from companies working on innovation in security risk and compliance, zero trust network access, democratizing fraud alerts, cloud infrastructure security, data security protection, encrypted learning, SecDevOps infrastructure platform, and universal data access services.
It is an exciting time to be in cybersecurity. Dr. Hugh Thompson, RSAC Conference Chair and emcee for Innovation Sandbox since inception, said, “Every year I continue to be impressed by the volume and range of creativity and talent being applied to the security space. You will see this on full display at this year's RSAC Innovation Sandbox where we welcome one of the best groups of entrepreneurs that we've ever had.”
Hope you can join us on May 19, 2021 9: 10 AM PT when we hear from the Top 10 and announce the winner. The RSAC 2021 ISB finalists (in alphabetical order) are:
Abnormal Security is a cloud-native email security platform that uses behavioral data science to protect enterprises from novel, sophisticated email attacks undetectable by secure email gateways. It deploys to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace in one click and delivers results immediately.
Apiiro is a Code Risk Platform™ that provides risk visibility with every change, from design to code to cloud. Apiiro gives a 360° view of security and compliance risks across applications, infrastructure and open-source code, developer experience, and business impact.
Axis Security Application Access Cloud introduces a new, and simple approach to app access. Built on a zero-trust approach, App Access Cloud enables use cases without the need for VPNs, VDIs, network changes, or agents on every device.
Cape Privacy is a global encrypted learning platform. It allows companies to collaborate on machine learning models without compromising proprietary or confidential data. Privacy is protected by default on Cape’s platform as companies share data with external parties to enrich data models and increase business value.
Deduce prevents account takeover, data leakage, and identity fraud. Powered by a comprehensive consumer data network of over 150,000 websites and over a billion daily authenticated user events, Deduce enables businesses to harness the collective power of identity-based threat intelligence.
Open Raven is a cloud native data platform aimed at restoring visibility and control of data lakes and warehouses. Purpose built for security and cloud teams, Open Raven makes data governance activities such as inventory and classification straightforward while automating security tasks like preventing data leaks and meeting compliance objectives.
Satori is a DataSecOps company that provides data access, security, and privacy for the modern data infrastructure. Satori’s Universal Data Access Service enables companies to embrace DataOps and streamline access to data while automating entitlements, classification, and security.
Strata provides identity orchestration for distributed, multi-cloud identity. The Maverics Platform enables enterprises to unify on-premises and cloud-based authentication and access systems for consistent identity management in multi-cloud environments. Strata is led by the co-authors of SAML.
Wabbi delivers scalable application security infrastructure for DevOps teams so enterprises no longer have to decide between agility or security.
Wiz helps organizations secure their cloud infrastructure at scale. Founded by the same team that founded Adallom and led Microsoft’s Cloud Security Group, Wiz provides security teams with the simplicity, visibility, and risk insights they need to stay one step ahead of their business.