14 innovative cloud security startups worth watching right now (2025)

What are cloud security startups?

Cloud security startups build tools that protect companies using cloud services, like stopping data breaches and making sure only the right people can access important files. Think of them as specialized security guards for the digital age, they focus on the unique problems that pop up when businesses move their operations to the cloud.

Top cloud security startups

Complete list of the most cloud security startups that are worth knowing:

Lookout

Founded in 2007, Lookout is a cybersecurity company focused on protecting against mobile threats. They make security software for both individual users and enterprise customers to stop phone-based attacks.

The Lookout app uses predictive analytics to detect device, network, and app risks before they turn into breaches. Their technology is powered by a sensor network of over 60 million global users that allows Lookout to uncover emerging mobile threats.

HYPR

Founded in 2014, HYPR offers a cloud platform that removes passwords from login experiences and replaces them with stronger security. Their technology uses encryption and other methods to verify user identities in a faster, more user-friendly way.

By eliminating passwords, HYPR protects against threats like phishing and fraud. Users can login securely to websites and apps through methods like biometrics, QR codes, or security keys instead of remembering long passwords.

Panther Labs

Founded in 2018, Panther Labs offers a cloud-based security operations platform designed to detect and respond to modern cyber threats. Their technology aims to outperform traditional security tools that often miss new attack patterns.

The Panther platform analyzes large volumes of event and log data using behavioral analysis and machine learning. This enables the detection of emerging hacking techniques and insider risks that rule-based systems miss. Alerts get triaged with log forensics to investigate issues.

Fastly

Founded in 2011, Fastly provides a global edge cloud platform to help digital businesses deliver fast, secure, and scalable online services. Leading websites and apps use Fastly’s network to improve performance and availability for their customers.

Fastly has points of presence located strategically around the internet backbone. By caching and processing content at the edge, static and dynamic sites can serve visitors faster by reducing the distance data needs to travel. Fastly handles growing traffic securely without straining origin infrastructure.

Neutriino

Neutriino is a software company that makes tools to manage cloud computing environments. Their platform helps teams oversee, control, and protect their networks, servers, and other infrastructure running on cloud services.

Public clouds have rapidly replaced old-fashioned data centers. But their complexity makes monitoring and security a struggle for IT teams. Neutriino consolidates all that operational data for total visibility across hybrid cloud stacks. Their dashboards integrate metrics, logs, costs, access policies, and more into centralized views that span on-prem, private, and public infrastructure. Everything stacks serve is observable on one pane of glass.

Cisco

Founded in 1984, Cisco provides cloud-based security solutions that utilize artificial intelligence and a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Their platforms help companies streamline business operations through software-defined networking, cloud management, and security controls.

Cisco offers tools like APIs, SDKs, and development resources that enable engineers and developers to build secure IT infrastructure and software. Their solutions allow users to deploy and administer security policies across multi-cloud environments from one centralized interface.

Datadog

Founded in 2010, Datadog offers a monitoring and analytics platform for cloud infrastructure, applications, logs, and services. Their solution provides real-time visibility into performance, costs, and usage across cloud providers.

Datadog’s dashboards integrate metrics, traces, and logs from all platforms and services in one place. Teams can visualize trends, analyze bottlenecks, and optimize spending. Advanced monitoring capabilities track databases, networks, errors, and more.

Aviatrix

Founded in 2014, Aviatrix offers cloud networking software that helps companies build hybrid cloud environments. Their tools connect infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and other major cloud providers to enable unified networking.

Typically, linking cloud networks requires complex wiring of virtual private clouds (VPCs), VNets, firewalls, etc. Aviatrix provides software to simplify that process without added hardware. Their platform integrates subnets, models security policies, and sets up transit gateways to bridge on-prem and multi-cloud.

Cyera

Founded in 2021, Cyera provides data security tools to help companies discover, classify, assess, and protect sensitive information stored in databases, files shares, and other systems. Their software works without requiring installation of agents on every endpoint.

Cyera scans structured databases and unstructured data repositories like file servers to inventory all data assets across an organization. Machine learning automatically tags and labels different data types based on patterns. This classification allows customized security rules and controls to match data sensitivity levels.

Grip Security

Founded in 2021, Grip Security provides a platform to help businesses reduce security risks related to employee access and identities across cloud applications. Their tools discover which SaaS apps are in use, prioritize risks, and coordinate fixing identified issues.

As organizations adopt more software-as-a-service apps, they lose visibility into permissions and access. Grip scans environments to detect cloud apps, compromised accounts or unauthorized settings in services like Slack, Google Workspace and Salesforce. Findings get risk-ranked so security teams know what to remediate first. Relevant policies can then be enforced uniformly across multiple applications.

Mitiga

Founded in 2019, Mitiga offers cloud security solutions that give organizations more visibility and control over threats in their SaaS applications and cloud environments. The Mitiga platform integrates with popular services like Google Workspace, Office 365, and AWS. It provides advanced monitoring to detect suspicious user activity, misconfigurations, and policy violations across cloud accounts.

Mitiga’s dashboards and alerts allow security teams to investigate issues and respond quickly to potential breaches. The software also enables admins to enforce configs and access controls across diverse SaaS and cloud users and apps.

Sentra

Founded in 2021, Sentra is a cybersecurity startup that provides data security tools for the cloud. Their platform gives companies more visibility into sensitive information stored in cloud apps and servers. It also automates risk analysis of access permissions around that data.

Sentra scans cloud systems to detect sensitive files and data exposures. It categorizes information like customer data or financial docs based on levels of confidentiality. Sentra then actively monitors access to those files by users and apps over time. Any suspicious activity triggers alerts for investigation.

Upwind Security

Founded in 2022, Upwind Security provides a range of cloud-based cybersecurity solutions for organizations. Their platform offers capabilities like cloud workload protection, cloud security monitoring, and cloud access controls.

Upwind secures cloud environments through tools to detect threats, check misconfigurations, govern identities, and respond to incidents in real-time. Their runtime analytics identify anomalies and vulnerabilities across cloud infrastructure and code. Granular controls lock down app and API access.

Veza

Founded in 2020, Veza is a cybersecurity startup focused on securing access permissions and privileges within organizations. Their software visually maps out user and application permissions to help teams strengthen policies and find security risks.

Keeping control of the constantly changing access landscape poses big challenges as organizations digitize. Veza builds interactive maps of employee duties, system roles and access needs. Their dashboards flag risky, redundant or unused access that leaves openings for security threats.

Conclusion

These cloud security startups are just the tip of the iceberg, but they show where cloud security is heading. Some will succeed, others might struggle, but they’re all pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud security. Looking at what these startups are building today gives us a pretty good idea of how we’ll all be protecting our cloud data tomorrow.