🌍 Cybersecurity Innovation Pulse #5: Thunderdome, (D)SPM, CrowdStrike Earnings, and more!

Week of March 2nd - March 9th

Howdy! 👋 Welcome to the fifth issue of the Cybersecurity Market Pulse newsletter where I track the latest events impacting the security industry including new product releases, the innovation intersection, partnerships, funding, earnings, M&A, and more. If you find my content helpful, subscribe to the newsletter to get it sent to your inbox every week. If you’re already subscribed, share it with a friend!

DALL-E

The Innovation Intersection 🌴

Product Releases and Enhancements

Wiz announced the release of their Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) capabilities. It seems that every week there is a new DSPM solution is announced. This signals strong market validation for the DSPMs. (Source)

Palo Alto Networks added an Identity Threat Detection and Response module to its Cortex XSIAM platform. Pretty intriguing play here. (Source)

GitHub to begin rolling out mandatory 2FA for all code contributors starting March 13th, 2023. (Source)

The U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has completed its Thunderdome prototype aimed at improving the Department of Defense's (DoD) Zero Trust strategy. (Source)

Akamai launched a threat hunting tool, Akamai Hunt, which leverages the infrastructure of Guardicore which they acquired in October 2022. (Source)

Elon Musk and Twitter aim to roll out encrypted DMs this month. A good play as Meta recently rolled out encrypted DMs for Instagram. (Source)

Microsoft and Mitre team up to release a plug-in that leverages various open-source tools to protect ML machines against attacks. I'm familiar with Mitre Caldera but have never heard of Atlas or Microsoft's Counterfit. Pretty cutting-edge stuff here. (Source)

SlashNext releases an AI-based email security solution called Generative HumanAI. The solution leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP), computer vision recognition, relationship graphs, contextual analysis, and more to help defend against email security threats. (Source)

Partnerships

CrowdStrike and Dell announce a strategic alliance to help provide cost-effective coverage to small-to-medium size businesses. (Source)

Wiz and SentinelOne announced a strategic partnership to bolster customer’s cloud workload security capabilities. Customers can now leverage the integration between SentinelOne's CWPP and Wiz's CNAPP. This comes a few weeks after Orca Security announced their partnership with ThreatOptix in a similar play. In my opinion, these moves signal that agent-based security and visibility for workloads is a non-negotiable and something that customers need. A combination of agentless and agent-based protection for workload seems to be the best path forward.  (Source)

The Market Beat 🥁

Funding News

Revelstoke, a low-code SOAR platform, receives $20M in a Series B round co-led by ClearSky Security and SYN Ventures.

Cado Security, a cloud forensics and incident response player raises a $20M round led by Eurazeo. (Source)

Inigo, a GraphQL API security start-up, raises $4.5M in seed funding from Engineering Capital, Hetz Ventures, and NextGen Venture Partners to scale its solution and GTM strategy. (Source)

The German-based start-up, Edgeless Systems raises $5M in seed funding led by SquareOne. The company is focused on building out an open-source stack for confidential computing. (Source)

Earnings

CrowdStrike beat analyst expectations with quarterly revenue coming in at $637.4M (+48% YoY). I listened to this earnings call live and was surprised by the shots taken at Microsoft's endpoint solution. Here is the transcript if you'd like to dig into it. (Source)

Mergers & Acquisitions

Akamai acquires Ondat, a "cloud-based storage technology provider with a Kubernetes-native platform for running stateful applications anywhere at scale." (Source)

Hewlett-Packard Enterprises (HPE) acquires a Security Access Services Edge (SASE) provider, Axis Security. (Source)

Bonus reads from this week 📚

SecDataOps and Vulnerability Management for AWS, a free e-book, from the man, the myth, the legend, Jonathan Rau, CISO at Lightspin.

Tech Giants Go Cloud Native Shopping

Cloudy Outlook for Israeli-based start-ups due to political turmoil

How to raise a Series A 

What Happens When Cybersecurity Unicorns Lose Their Horns

Securing a successful merger: Insights from MGM Studios