2025 RSAC Innovation Sandbox Finalists Announced
A look at this year's RSAC Innovation Sandbox Finalists
Welcome to The Cybersecurity Pulse (TCP)! I'm Darwin Salazar, Head of Growth + Marketing at Monad and former detection engineer in big tech. Each week, I dig through all the major headlines to bring you the latest security product innovation and industry news. Subscribe below for weekly updates! 📧
The RSA Conference (RSAC) Innovation Sandbox (ISB) top 10 finalists were just announced this morning. Now in it’s 20th year, they’ve added a new component of a $5 million investment via an uncapped Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) note from Crosspoint Capital Partners for all finalists. I have many questions + concerns about this including that the announcement post doesn’t mention whether finalists can decline the investment.
In any case, being an ISB finalist carries a lot of weight and helps open up doors for rising startups. Also, it’s great to see that only 4 of 10 focus on AI security during an era that has been consumed by AI.
Anyhow, let’s take a look at this year’s finalists!
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The 2025 Finalists
The finalists (in alphabetical order) are:
Aurascape believes AI has the potential to supercharge how society works. However, unchecked use of AI, Generative AI, and AI Agents does bring risks. Aurascape gives security and AI leaders the protection they need to confidently embrace AI.
CalypsoAI secures applications and agents through its Inference Platform — protecting AI at runtime with customizable defensive controls, agentic red-teaming, remediation, governance, and observability solutions — helping enterprises safely scale AI.
Command Zero
Command Zero is an autonomous and AI-assisted investigations platform, built to transform security operations. It empowers analysts to run advanced investigations and threat hunts in complex environments. The platform reduces mean time to understand and respond — delivering expert outcomes at scale.
EQTY Lab pioneers solutions that accelerate trust in AI. The AI Integrity Suite applies cryptography to ensure that the governance of AI agents is accountable and verifiable. With applications in the public sector, life sciences, and finance, EQTY Lab is at the forefront of enabling AI innovation.
Knostic ⭐
Knostic provides need-to-know based access controls for LLMs. With knowledge-centric capabilities, Knostic enables organizations to accelerate the adoption of LLMs and drive AI-powered innovation without compromising value, security, or safety. Winner of the 2024 Blackhat Startup Spotlight competition.
Metalware helps enterprises and governments secure critical infrastructure firmware at scale. Its binary fuzzing platform automates the traditionally complex process of firmware testing, enabling customers to detect and remediate vulnerabilities in embedded systems before deployment.
MIND
MIND is a data security platform that puts Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and Insider Risk Management (IRM) programs on autopilot to deliver both posture and prevention. MIND discovers and classifies sensitive data, fixes data security issues, and stops sensitive data leaks.
ProjectDiscovery
ProjectDiscovery.io equips security teams with open-source tools to find and fix vulnerabilities fast. Powered by Nuclei, the platform automates attack surface monitoring and vulnerability management — helping organizations stay ahead of real-world threats.
Smallstep
Smallstep ensures only company-owned devices can access sensitive resources. Co-developers of ACME Device Attestation with Google and Apple, the Device Identity Platform solves the "other half" of Zero Trust by securing Wi-Fi, VPNs, ZTNA, SaaS apps, and cloud APIs with hardware-bound credentials.
Twine Security
Twine builds AI digital employees who execute tasks from A to Z to help cyber teams close the talent gap. The company's first AI digital employee, Alex, learns, understands and takes away the burden of identity management tasks — proactively completing the organization's cyber objectives.
Source: PR Newswire
The Future of Security
Whether or not they take home the “Most Innovative Startup” crown, all ten finalists are certainly worth watching. In fact, some ISB runners-up have skyrocketed in years following the contest (Case in point: Wiz, which lost to winner Apiiro in 2021, was recently acquired by Google for $32B) and some have even IPO’d (SentinelOne, Imperva, Sumo Logic, and Sourcefire).
Out of the 10, I’m most bullish on Metalware, EQTY Lab, and CalypsoAI. Who are you most excited about? 👀
Hey Darwin, great summary. Hopefully you will have a chance to stop by and say hi to us at the Twine booth. Maybe we can make you bullish on us also :)