TCP #86: Top Startups, Events, Swag, and Booths at RSAC 2025
🌶️ What's hot in security | May 2025
Welcome to The Cybersecurity Pulse (TCP)! I'm Darwin Salazar, Product + 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! 📧
👋🏼 Happy Friday y’all! This is the last installment of my RSAC coverage and probably my favorite one. If you missed any of it, check it out here:
TCP #85: 2025 RSAC Recap Pt. 1 (125+ product announcements)
There’s A LOT that goes into pulling off an event at the scale of RSAC (4 days and 40K+ ppl). Long nights, countless brainstorming sessions, the fear + thrill of wondering whether your marketing approach will work, prospecting, locking in the perfect venue for an event, taking time away from family, the list goes on and on. That said, I wanted to give a big shout out to everyone who continuously pours in to make the magic happen for these events.
Also, if you’re one of these people^, and nobody has told you yet, you should probably take a PTO day or two. Very high ROI.
Tl;dr 🙄
Anyways, this post will cover more of my experience at RSAC as opposed to industry coverage. I’ll hit on:
Top startups I came across
Favorite Events
Favorite Swag
Favorite Booths
Venture Land news
Industry reports launched at RSAC
Okay cool, let’s cyber 🕺🏽
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🏆 Top Startups I came across 🏆
Founded by the former CISO and security leaders at Anduril, SpaceX and Palantir.
They leverage an org's existing security stack, AI agents, and a digital twin of customer's environment to carry out attack simulations, enrich alerts and ‘continuous access analysis’. They also provide compliance coverage + recommendations.
They effectively hit most of CISOs top concerns including IAM (NHI+HI), attack surface management, alert fatigue in the SOC, and compliance.
They're a team of ~8ppl based in Austin, TX and backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, XYZ, and Human Capital. Great energy, bright future imo.
Winners of the RSAC Innovation Sandbox competition and owners of Nuclei, an open source vulnerability scanner. Here's their winning pitch:
Winners of the CrowdStrike x AWS x NVIDIA Cybersecurity Startup Accelerator competition where 10 finalists pitched to the CEO of CrowdStrike + CISO at Amazon and CSO at NVIDIA. Kenzo and Rig were runner-ups and worth watching as well.
Terra does automated continuous web app pen testing.
DAST and SAST with an agentic AI spin. Founded by the founders of Jask.and Anomali. Really refreshing take on the AppSec space.
I’d say Silent Push is leading the next wave of threat intelligence. They crawl the entire internet on a daily basis (compute intensive😅) to track and uncover threat actor infrastructure and activity. They’ve coined the term Indicators of Future Attacks (IOFA) - great marketing. If you look through their blog, they’ve actually uncovered pretty interesting threat campaigns.
This is a great feeder for SOC teams. They do have a free community edition if you wanna see what they’re about.
While they were founded in 2020 and have many Fortune 500s as customers, this was the first time they came on my radar.
Favorite events
A lot of the magic of RSAC happens away from Moscone. Here were my favorite events and few pics from them! No Chainsmokers or Marshmallo for me. Black Coffee or Damian Lazarus are more my speed 🔥 )’( 🔥
ConductorOne’s Golden Ticket with secret speakeasy and wine/whiskey sommeliers
Annual Cyversity meetup
DryRun’s Aegis of Security AppSec x AI event with Daniel Miessler + Jason Haddix
Annual Diverse CISO meetup sponsored by Cyera
Ghost Security's Hottest Innovator's party
Anvilogic x Databricks x Return on Security’s Changemakers event
Code Red x Resourcely x ConductorOne Sweat and Security @ Orange Theory
Formal x Scanner.dev BSidesSF pre-party
🤩 Favorite Booths 🤩
Placement: Front row on Moscone South.
“Trust is a team sport” - Great slogan
Arcade hoops brings interactivity to another level 🏀
Torq’s booth was the talk of the town. They went BIG with a monster truck. Kudos to them!
Wiz stuck with their bright, bubbly theme this year. Tons of interactivity and not that many demo screens which encourages more dialogue and visitors to stick around longer.
I can’t really speak on the theme since I’m not the intended audience, but I would love to know how it makes CISOs feel + think. If you’re a CISO with any strong feels on this, PM me! 🤗
Favorite Swag
RedCanary t-shirt ❤️🔥
Sublime Security care package 👁️💚
Maybe I’m biased because I created it + I love minimalistic designs, but I really love the new Monad trucker caps. If you like the work we’re doing at Monad and would like some swag, hit me up! Always happy to ship out care packages!
🏝️ Venture Land 🏝️
Scale Venture Partners' 12th annual Cybersecurity Perspectives report
Craft Ventures Emerging Areas of Interest for CISOs
Forgepoint Forward Q2 2025: What’s Ahead in Security Log Data Management
Former Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables Joins Ballistic Ventures
Fantastic addition by the Ballistic team which is already stacked w/ folks like Kevin Mandia, Barmak Meftah, Nicole Perlroth and more. Definitely one of the best firms in the security space at the moment.
Here’s their portfolio: https://ballisticventures.com/portfolio/
Vendor Reports
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Bye for now 👋🏽
That’s all for this week… ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!
Disclaimer
The insights, opinions, and analyses shared in The Cybersecurity Pulse are my own and do not represent the views or positions of my employer or any affiliated organizations. This newsletter is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal, security, or investment advice.