- Return on Security
- Posts
- 💰 Security, Funded #176 - Do More With the Same
💰 Security, Funded #176 - Do More With the Same
Get cybersecurity market and intelligence insights, including key trends and industry analysis, from January 1, 2025 to January 12, 2025.
Mike Privette
January 13, 2025 • Reading Time: 11 minutes
Security, Funded provides a weekly analysis of economic activity in the cybersecurity market. This week’s issue is presented together with Harmonic Security and Nudge Security.
Hey there,
Hope you had a great weekend and are getting back into the swing of the new year!
This week’s issue will be slightly different, just like last week’s issue. Consider this first issue covering the start of 2025 from January 1st until January 12th. After this week, I’ll move back to the business-as-usual cadence of covering just the previous week’s activity.
Also, I made a small update to the referral program, which now only requires one referral to get access to the full database of Great Reads links since the very first issue. Check it out here (https://www.returnonsecurity.com/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER ), and please be sure to share with someone who you think will find this newsletter valuable!
TOGETHER WITH
Is 2025 The Year to Move Past Blocking GenAI?
This is the year your AI committee moves from blockers to builders. Your competitors aren’t waiting to use GenAI—and neither should you.
Adopt GenAI in a smart way with Harmonic Security:
Give employees the right guardrails to securely adopt GenAI
Identify Shadow AI and GenAI tools training on your data
Detect sensitive data leaving the business via GenAI apps
Coach users via inline training and nudging towards safe AI use
Nudge your AI committee to embrace GenAI’s potential with the right safeguards in place.
Table of Contents
😎 Vibe Check
How is your organization’s cybersecurity function perceived at the executive level? |
Last issue’s vibe check:
What’s the biggest driver for your company’s investment in “AI for Security” or “Security for AI”?
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Addressing talent shortages (8)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Automating manual security processes (24)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Enhancing threat detection and response (6)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Staying competitive in the market vs. peers (6)
44 Votes
Far and away last week, people said that their main AI and Security use case was around automating manual security processes. This should come as no surprise, as the sheer amount of effort and context required to make security decisions has only increased (which will likely always be true). Baked into this, in my opinion, is the inherent driver of “doing more with the same.”
Intelligent augmentation and automation are what everyone wants and needs out of the AI & Security space (the basics), so start here, and then we can get to some more advanced use cases later if, and only if (!), we can solve the basics.
Some of the top comments from last week:
Threat detection - “We want our automation to be deliberate, thought out, but the work of quick statistical analysis of device behavior is beyond most of our current capabilities -- ML helps here greatly”
Automation - “Most of the manual things we are using AI for is documentation and security packages. The stuff that requires you to type things out but is fairly static and reproducible. I would actually call it automation more than AI, but here we are.”
💰 Market Summary
6 companies raised $64.3M across 5 unique product categories in 5 countries
9 companies were acquired or had a merger event across 7 unique product categories
100% of funding went to product-based cybersecurity companies
No public cyber companies had an earnings report
Reply