The past year has been a busy one for startups, with investors re-evaluating their rules on what kind of companies to invest in and larger companies going shopping for innovative technologies.
Focusing on individual acquisitions or startup launches makes it easy to miss the investment trends.
Recent announcements from MACH37, an accelerator focused on innovation in cybersecurity, and DataTribe, a venture capital firm focused on cybersecurity startups, provide a glimpse of the areas in which investors are most interested in spending their money and time.
While Mach37 and DataTribe had different approaches in how they identified innovation in cybersecurity, they are both looking for companies and technologies capable of solving increasingly complex cybersecurity challenges.
Mach37 Plants the Seeds Mach37 focuses on scaling and market integration, because the goal is building up each startup's potential for long-term growth.
Many potential investors, early-adopting customers, and potential channel partners want to see how companies perform throughout an accelerator program before investing or partnering.
Startups benefit from mentorship opportunities, learn to develop sustainable business practices, and get help lining up customers.
Mach37 named a range of startups offering AI-powered SaaS platforms, intelligence-grade cloaking, and cybersecurity intelligence platforms to its cyber accelerator class of 2023.
DataTribe Grows the Seeds In contrast, DataTribe zeroes in on the seed stage, seeking more fundamental, ground-breaking shifts in cybersecurity and data science.
The venture capital firm recently announced the DataTribe Challenge, where seed-stage cybersecurity startups applied for the opportunity to win up to $2 million in seed capital.
The finalists were selected based on how they tackled areas such as secure logins and AI risk management.
The five finalists focused on hardware bills of materials and vulnerability analysis, secure login and authentication, software bills of materials and supply chain security, serverless SecOps, and scoring AI/ML models as part of risk management.
The winner of the DataTribe Challenge was Vigilant Ops, which signals an increased focus on securing the building blocks of hardware and software products, says John Funge, managing director at DataTribe.
Investors Eat Up AI/ML While AI might feel new, it has actually been a critical factor in cybersecurity for years.
The development and evolution of artificial intelligence has shaped the direction of cybersecurity, in terms of both technical capabilities and the democratization of tool development and use.
The defensive use of AI will need to evolve not just to answer the onslaught of new threats, but also to provide a new level of continuous monitoring, anticipate and predict where threats will go next, look for poisoned data meant to throw off AI models, detect false positives, and characterize other new phenomena.
The focus on authentication, threat intelligence, and AI tools across these two programs reflects the broader cybersecurity landscape, where organizations are looking for better authentication methods and improved intelligence about attacker activity.
Supply chain security is also becoming a bigger part of the conversation as adversaries increasingly target third-party components in order to compromise applications and devices.
Here the startup space often outpaces large enterprise solutions in speed of innovation and product availability.
That makes it an exciting time for cybersecurity startups focusing on AI, as well as investors looking for new ways to tackle old problems.
This Cyber News was published on www.darkreading.com. Publication date: Wed, 27 Dec 2023 14:00:32 +0000