In a recent article we discussed the topic of cybersecurity and gave you 10 publicly traded cyber security companies you could invest in to play this theme. As with any technology niche, some of the most exciting players are often startups because they are high risk and high reward. For retail investors, it becomes very difficult to invest in startups but nonetheless you should be aware of what they are up to because those publicly traded stocks you hold might just be displaced by a nimble startup.
So how can we tell which cybersecurity startups are the hottest? The best way is to follow the money and look at what venture capital (VC) investors think is hot. One of the ways you can tell is by looking at what valuations VCs are ascribing to startups, especially those which they value at over $1 billion (otherwise known as unicorns). Let’s take a look at 9 cybersecurity unicorns, any of which just might be the next Symantec. This list of companies was derived from a real-time list of unicorns maintained by the bright minds at CB Insights (there are 176 unicorns in total at the moment). All of these companies are valued at $1 billion except for Tanium ($3.5 billion) and Okta ($1.2 billion).
Founded in 2007, Tanium has taken in just over $300 million in funding to develop an “endpoint security and management system”. In the world of cybersecurity, an “endpoint” is any device (computer, tablet, smartphone) that is connected to a corporate network. Tanium provides the only platform of its kind which offers a Google-like search that will scan millions of endpoints across your entire enterprise. You can use the platform to reactively identify security breaches or to proactively query your endpoints using natural language with results returned in less than 15 seconds. No more pesky emails from some IT guy in Mumbai asking you if you installed that security patch yet.
Founded in 2009, Okta has taken in $228 million in funding to become the leading “provider of identity” for enterprises. If you are completely old school like we are, you would probably remember Novell Directory Services (NDS) which was an ancient tool used in the past to manage access to computer resources and keep track of users on your network. That’s what Okta does except a million times better and they allow your enterprise to integrate with over 5,000 different apps using a single sign on (SSO). As you would expect, the entire thing lives up in “the cloud“.
Founded in 2000, ForeScout has taken in around $121 million to identify unknown devices as soon as they connect to a network. There is no need to install any sort of client on devices for it to see them or keep track of them. In a world where we expect to soon have billions of IoT devices connecting to our networks, the ForeScout solution takes control immediately of devices that attach to your network and keeps you in the loop at all ti
via www.nanalyze.com