Buzzy trends come and go in the fast-paced world of startups. When it comes to cybersecurity though, the field only seems to be getting more crowded as the threats to businesses accelerate and become ever-more sophisticated.
As Fortune surveyed the startup landscape for the second annual Cyber 60 list, in partnership with Lightspeed Venture Partners, the growing importance of cybersecurity within the startup and venture scene was more noticeable than ever. This year’s list of startups includes fresh names developing innovative tools to protect organizations from emerging threats like AI, as well as startups whose tools are already considered so vital that they generate hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.
Consider Wiz, which appears on the Cyber 60 list for the second consecutive year. The four-year-old U.S.-Israeli startup, which says it’s on track for $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, rocketed to the public’s attention in July as Google considered acquiring it for $23 billion—a deal that would have been the largest in Google’s history. The fact that Wiz rejected the deal and opted to go it alone in a quest for an eventual IPO underscores the cybersecurity sector’s growing clout and potential.
Lightspeed, Fortune’s partner for the list, also worked with Wakefield Research to survey 200 CISOs and dig into some of the biggest trends, priorities, and worries facing security leaders today. Roughly seven out of 10 said their organizations were increasing cybersecurity budgets this year. And 87% said that AI would have an impact on their vendor choices for cybersecurity over the next year.
No surprise then that protecting against AI threats, as well as ensuring that in-house AI efforts don’t create new vulnerabilities for hackers to exploit, figures prominently among the focus areas of many of the startups on this year’s list. Data security—particularly important with generative AI—as well as cloud infrastructure security and identity management, also rank high among the offerings of the top startups.
As with last year’s list, we’ve organized the startups into three buckets: early stage companies; mid-, or early-growth-stage companies; and late-, or growth-stage companies.
The growth stage category has a significant number of repeats from last year, a testament to the strength of those businesses and to the current market’s dearth of exits amid an IPO drought and a cautious M&A climate.