There are 82 SOC Automation Startups
Is that too many?
It is a frequent refrain that there are too many cybersecurity vendors and that there will soon be a blood bath of failures. I don’t think that is the case. I think we are missing the forest for the trees.
Most people in cybersecurity are deeply familiar with specific vendors; Microsoft, Crowdstrike, Palo Alto Networks, even Fortinet. They have years of experience with the tools these vendors sell. When confronted with the fact that there are 288 firewall vendors, 479 end point protection vendors, and over a thousand competitors to Palo Alto’s portfolio or Microsoft’s, they can’t grasp the myriad reasons why that could possibly be.
They forget the importance of geography, language, and recently the concept of “sovereignty” as applied to technology. There is a strong tendency to “buy local” that is hard to fight. Thus in Japan and Taiwan you are going to find TrendAI as the dominant endpoint protection platform. In Perth, Australia, I would not be surprised to learn that UTM vendor Red Piranha outnumbers Fortinet deployments.
Sovereignty, or country of origin became critically important after Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA had working relationships (taps) with the major US tech vendors to ingest everything. That distrust of US tech has only grown in recent years with the erratic behavior exhibited by the US.
And then there is the variation of use case, industry vertical, technology integrations, and innovation. There is always a better mousetrap. There are always special requirements.
SOC Automation, sometimes called “Agentic SOC,” is a new category only appearing after the advent of generative AI ushered in by the release of ChatGPT on November 30th, 2022. Since then we have seen the greatest surge in cybersecurity startups ever. At IT-Harvest we track 520 AI native cybersecurity companies. They either provide protections for AI, like guardrails, governance, and model protection, or use AI to tackle security problems like email security, vulnerability management, compliance automation, red teaming, or SOC Automation.
There are 82 SOC Automation vendors. A few were headed that way before the advent of GenAI, so got a boost with new capabilities. That does not include the legacy vendors that have introduced SOC Automation tools in recent months. Will most of them fail? I don’t think so.
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First of all, just step back and look at the forest. Think of the mundane un-sexy world of security awareness training. There are 57 stand alone security awareness training companies, not including consultants. Why don’t they all fail and KnowB4, by far the biggest, gain a monopoly? Because of language, local proximity of sales people, niche markets, price variance, and technological innovation leading to new ways to adopt faster to changing threat techniques.
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I don’t think the general idea of “too many vendors” holds water. Look at the growth of Hoxhunt, a Finnish security awareness company. Obviously, they have traction in a mature market.
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For SOC Automation I am ready to argue that there is near infinite demand for SOC Automation and therefore plenty of market for 82 or more vendors. On the demand side imagine the customers of the 42,000 MSSPs in the world. All of them are candidates for switching to automation. Or the MSSPs (like Binary Defense’s introduction of Night Beacon) will switch to automation, often by incorporating technology from one or more of the 82 SOC Automation vendors.
Here are the top 20 SOC Automation vendors by funding level.
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For the complete spreadsheet fill out our contact form and check the box!
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Will some of these vendors fail? Of course. Some will run out of money and find that investors are too enamored of the next shiny thing to support them. Actual crash-and-burns are rare in cybersecurity. The typical “failure” occurs when the founders split up or pivot to a new space. And yes, many will be acquired. But SOC Automation will not consolidate to seven or eight vendors anytime soon.
I had Claude Cowork create a couple of more graphs.
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