💰 Security, Funded #208 - Summer Siesta Season

Get cybersecurity market and intelligence insights, including key trends and industry analysis, for the week of August 18, 2025.

Author

Mike Privette
August 25, 2025 • Reading Time: 10 minutes

Security, Funded by Return on Security, is a weekly analysis of economic activity in the cybersecurity market. This week’s issue is brought to you by Redsift and Nudge Security.

Hey -

Hope you had a great weekend, or a fin de semana as they say in Spain 🇪🇸 , where this week’s opener was written.

Summer is coming to a close around the world in the next few weeks, and you can tell everyone took some time off if you’ve been following along the past few weeks. The industry is experiencing its seasonal slowdown (until after Burning Man at least), but that’s not stopping the cyber industry from making significant moves.

Let’s get this bread jamón, familia. 🐷 

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😎 Vibe Check

Click the options below to vote on whether you are a practitioner, founder, or investor. Feel free to leave a comment, and I'll feature the best takes in next week’s write-up!

Which compliance requirement makes the least actual security sense?

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Last issue’s vibe check:
How's your team handling the AI tool explosion?
🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🚫 Banned until further notice
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 📝 Death by approval process
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤠 Wild west - anything goes
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤖 Let AI review the AI usage

Wow, I’m actually surprised that banning AI outright is 1) still so popular, and 2) even effective in the slightest! This sounds more like a “best effort” control, rather than a hard denial of all AI services.

Considering how many new AI services keep popping up and how all these existing platforms now have AI inside of them in some shape or form, I don’t know how security teams keep up with the approvals or the blocking.

Some of the top comments from last week’s vibe check:

💬 “Now if only we were blocking them during the approval process...”

💰 Market Summary

Private Markets

  • 7 companies from 4 countries raised $60.1M across 6 unique product categories

  • Average deal size was $10.0M (median: $2.4M)

  • 100% of funding went to product companies

  • 4 companies from 3 countries were acquired for $1.3M

  • 75% of M&A activity went to product companies

Public Markets

  • 1 public cyber company had an earnings report

  • 1 cyber company filed an S-1 to go public

As of markets close on August 22, 2025.

📸 YoY Snapshot

Rolling 12-week charts that compare funding and acquisitions weekly in a year-over-year (YoY) view between 2024 and 2025.

Funding activity over the past 12 weeks totaled $6.9B across 153 deals (mean: $52.4M, median: $9.5M), representing a 136% increase compared to the same period last year. This week saw continued activity with $60.1M raised, down 13% from last week's $69.0M.

M&A activity remained strong with 90 acquisitions completed over the trailing 12 weeks (averaging 7.5 per week). This is a 67% increase from the 54 acquisitions during the same period in the previous year.

PARTNER

The Game Has Changed for AI Governance

AI is now in every SaaS app, complicating data security

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That's where Nudge Security comes in. Nudge discovers every AI app, user account, integration, OAuth grant, and more, in minutes. And, Nudge delivers guardrails to employees to secure identities and data.

☎️ Earnings Reports

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🧩 Funding By Product Category

  • $50.0M for Security Orchestration and Automated Response (SOAR) across 1 deal

  • $4.0M for Fraud and Financial Crime Protection across 1 deal

  • $3.7M for Application Security across 2 deals

  • $1.4M for AI Governance across 1 deal

  • $1.0M for Security Analytics across 1 deal

  • An undisclosed amount for Data Access Governance across 1 deal

🏢 Funding By Company

Product Companies:

Service Companies:

  • None

🌎 Funding By Country

  • $50.0M for Israel across 1 deal

  • $8.4M for the United Kingdom across 3 deals

  • $1.8M for the United States across 2 deals

  • An undisclosed amount for Poland across 1 deal

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

Product Companies:

  • CloudCodes, a Canada-based cloud access security broker (CASB), was acquired by Scope Technologies for $1.3M. CloudCodes has not previously disclosed any funding events. (more)

  • Pocket Universe, a United States-based browser extension protecting against malicious distributed ledger technology attacks and cryptocurrency fraud, was acquired by Kerberus Cyber Security, Inc. for an undisclosed amount. Pocket Universe has not previously disclosed any funding events. (more)

  • Trag, an Armenia-based automated static code analysis and software migration platform, was acquired by Aikido Security for an undisclosed amount. Trag had previously raised $100.0K in funding. (more)

Service Companies:

  • Caesar Creek Software, a United States-based professional services firm focused on offensive security and vulnerability analysis, was acquired by Cryptic Vector for an undisclosed amount. Caesar Creek Software has not previously disclosed any funding events. (more)

🤘 IPO-h Yeah

  • Netskope, a United States-based cloud security and secure access company founded in 2012, filed an S-1 to go public on the Nasdaq after raising $1.4B in funding to date. (more)

📚 Great Reads

*A message from our partner

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Data Methodology and Sources

  • All of the data is captured point-in-time from publicly available sources.

  • All financial figures are converted to U.S. Dollars (USD) at the current spot rate at the time of collection.

  • Company country locations are pulled from publicly available sources.

  • Companies are categorized using the Return on Security system.

  • Sometimes the deal details, such as who led the round, how much was raised, or the deal stage, may be updated after publication.

  • Let us know if you spot any errors, and we’ll fix them.

1  Disclosure: I’m an LP at Osney Capital.

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