These startups are jumping in where most established security vendors have yet to go.




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The problems cybersecurity startups attempt to solve are often a bit ahead of the mainstream. They can move faster than most established companies to fill gaps or emerging needs. Startups can often innovative faster because they are unfettered by an installed base.

The downside, of course, is that startups often lack resources and maturity. It’s a risk for a company to commit to a startup’s product or platform, and it requires a different kind of customer/vendor relationship. The rewards, however, can be huge if it gives that company a competitive advantage or reduces stress on security resources.

The vendors below represent some of the most interesting startups (defined here as a company founded or emerging from stealth mode in the past two years).

[Editor’s note: This article, originally published November 11, 2022, is periodically updated as new startups emerge.]

Aembit

Aembit produces a cloud-based identity platform that lets DevOps and security teams discover, manage, enforce, and audit access between federated workloads. The company helps organizations apply a zero trust security framework to workload access, similar to existing solutions for workforce access, by providing seamless and secure access from workloads to the services companies depend on, such as APIs, databases, and cloud resources. Aembit launched in 2023.

Akto

Founded in 2021, Akto focuses on API security. The company claims its platform, run locally or in the cloud, discovers and tests internal, external, and third-party APIs. It then finds vulnerabilities quickly during runtime. It supports key API data sources such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes. The platform can be deployed in about a minute, according to Akto.

Axiado

Axiado develops trusted control/compute unit (TCU) processors that offer hardware-based and AI-driven security technologies. The company claims its semiconductors provide pre-emptive threat detection in an AI-driven approach to platform security against ransomware, supply chain, side-channel, and other cyberattacks against cloud data centers, 5G networks and other disaggregated compute networks.