The 10 Hottest Cloud Security Startups In 2022 (So Far)

Those developing cloud security products and services are arguably the hottest of the hottest startups.

By now, most everyone knows that cybersecurity is arguably the hottest tech segment around, due to high demand for new security products and services amid increasingly malicious cyberattacks across the globe.

And cloud security is arguably the hottest subsector of the overall hot cybersecurity sector in general.

The reason: the increasing flow of data to the cloud, as remote and hybrid work expand.

Investors have clearly identified cloud security as a top priority moving forward, lately pumping hundreds of millions of dollars per quarter in young firms trying make the cloud more secure.

The following are some of the hottest cloud security startups just in the first half of 2022.

* Immuta

* Cyera

* JupiterOne

* Laminar

* Lightspin

* BastionZero

* Netskope

* DoControl

* Armo

* Wiz

See the lastest entry: The 10 Hottest Cloud Security Startup Companies Of 2022

Immuta

CEO and co-founder: Matt Carroll

The venture arm of data cloud provider Snowflake obviously thinks Immuta is hot, considering it was among a group of investors who recently sunk an additional $100 million into the Boston-based cloud security company.

Immuta isn’t well known among channel players for a reason: The company, provider of data security and access control, has until recently been selling almost exclusively via direct sales. But Matt Carroll, co-founder and CEO of Immuta, says that’s going to change “ASAP,” with a planned build-out of a new channel program.

Cyera

CEO and co-founder: Yotam Segev

Based in San Mateo, Calif. and Tel Aviv, Cyera emerged from stealth mode earlier this year with $60 million in funding, courtesy of Sequoia, Accel, Cyberstarts and other investors.

Cyera’s ambitious goal is “to lead the data-first revolution in cloud security.” According to its launch press release, Cyera was co-founded in 2021 by Yotam Segev, CEO, and Tamar Bar-Ilan, CTO. “The two met over a decade ago in the Israeli Defense Forces‘ (IDF) elite Talpiot leadership academy and served together in the IDF’s Unit 8200 where they founded, built, and ran the cloud security division.”

JupiterOne

CEO and founder: Erkang Zheng

JupiterOne just recently joined the billion-dollar valuation club, thanks to a $70 million Series C funding round, led by Tribe Capital, with participation from new investors, including Intel Capital, Alpha Square Group and existing investors Sapphire, Bain Capital Ventures, Cisco Investments and Splunk Ventures.

Founded in 2018, the Morrisville, N.C.-based JupiterOne, a cyber asset attack surface management (CAASM) platform provider, has now raised more than $119 million and its estimated valuation is more than $1 billion. The company consolidates and normalizes asset data across complex, multi-cloud environments.

Laminar

CEO and Co-founder: Amit Shaked

Laminar has had a stellar time over the past six months or so. Late last year, the cloud data security firm raised $37 million in Series A funding – and then in early June it announced it had raised yet another $30 million in funding. Not bad. Tiger Global Management and Salesforce Venture were among the firm’s latest investors.

Since emerging from stealth mode last year, the Tel Aviv and New York-based Laminar says it has already “seen significant demand from CISOs and their security teams for its cloud data security solutions, which in turn is driving investor excitement.”

Lightspin

CEO and co-founder: Vladi Sandler

Last year, Lightspin was named one of CRN’s “Emerging Security Vendors To Know In 2021.” Dell Technologies Capital was obviously one of those firm that indeed got to know Lightspin, with the firm leading a $16 million Series A funding round for Lightspin that included Ibex Investors as a participating investor.

Founded in 2020, the Tel Aviv-based Lightspin has developed a context-based cloud security platform for cloud-native and Kubernetes environments. Though only a few years old, Lightspin has said it has been “experiencing exceptional market growth” of late.

BastionZero

CEO and co-founder: Sharon Goldberg

BastionZero has had a good 2022 so far. In March, the Boston-based cloud security startup announced it had raised $6 million in seed funding, led by Dell Technologies Capital, with Akamai and DG Lab Fund participating. Then in June, it was a finalist for the prestigious RSAC startup company of the year award. Cloud Bastion didn’t win the contest, but it won a lot respect in the process.

Founded by two Boston University professors, BastionZero describes itself as a “cloud service that controls remote access to the infrastructure targets that backend and cloud engineering teams use to build and host their software services (e.g. servers, kubernetes clusters, databases, internal web applications).”

Netskope

CEO: Sanjay Beri

Having raised $300 million last year in Series H funding, Netskope isn’t just one of the hottest cloud security firms around. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor is one of the hottest young tech companies in general. Period.

Netskope, whose latest funding round was led by ICONIQ Growth, was planning to use its new cash to expand both its platform and go-to-market to meet demand for its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. Earlier this year, it debuted its global partner program to drive services revenue.

DoControl

CEO: Adam Gavish

This past spring, DoControl announced it had raised another $30 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $45 million since its founding in 2020. The New York-based DoControl is an automated software-as-a-service (SaaS) security company whose product is already used by customers by many top companies, including cybersecurity firms such as CrowdStrike and Devo.

DoControl has said the latest round of funding will be used by double its headcount and allow it to develop a national channel partner program to “enable managed service providers, resellers and other key partners to provide zero=trust SaaS data access control capabilities to a broader user base.”

Armo

CEO and co-founder: Shauli Rozen

Last year, it was $4.5 million in seed money. This year, it’s $30 million in Series A funding for Armo, the Tel Aviv-based cloud security company started about three years ago. Announced in April, the latest funding round was led by Tiger Global with Hyperwise Ventures among the other investors.

Armo says Kubernetes, the open-source container orchestration solution, has become the “de-facto operating system for cloud-native applications.”

Wiz

CEO and co-founder: Assaf Rappaport

Founded in 2020, Wiz has already become an established player in the cybersecurity world, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and pushing its valuation last year to more than $6 billion.

But the New York and Tel Aviv-based cloud security provider has been making headlines for other reasons as well, including calling out vulnerabilities it has recently found in Microsoft’s popular Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. The vulnerabilities have since been fixed.

Wiz has said its architecture facilitates scanning of the entire cloud environment across all compute types and cloud services for vulnerabilities, configuration, network, and security issues.