What are the funding trends in cybersecurity right now?

All funding deals in the cybersecurity market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our report covering the Cybersecurity Market.

Is cybersecurity funding really up right now?

Cybersecurity funding is clearly stronger today than it was during the same stretch of last year, with more money, more deals and more companies getting funded.

We tracked 170 qualifying financings and more than $8.31 billion of capital in the current period. The comparable 2025 period produced 146 deals and $5.66 billion. Unique funded companies increased from 143 to 161, so the improvement reaches well beyond a small group of repeat raisers.

Round sizes have moved up at the same time. The median financing reached $20 million, versus $15 million last year and $10.75 million two years ago. Rounds getting steadily larger is one of the shifts we follow each quarter in our report on cybersecurity.

The two-year comparison is especially useful. Current capital is 38.8% above the comparable 2024 level even though deal count remains 8.6% lower. Investors are funding fewer companies than they did two years ago, but the companies that clear the bar are raising much more.

Current funding has also reached roughly 91% of the capital raised during the entire previous calendar year and has already passed the full-year 2024 capital total. We would not annualize that pace because funding comes in bursts, but it shows how much money is moving through cybersecurity these days.

Metric	2026 YTD	2025 comparable period	2024 comparable period	Change vs 2025
Total capital	$8.31B+	$5.66B	$5.99B	+46.9%
Deals	170	146	186	+16.4%
Unique funded companies	161	143	178	+12.6%
Median round	$20.0M	$15.0M	$10.75M	+33.3%
Average round	$48.9M	$38.8M	$32.2M	+26.2%
Capital excluding rounds above $50M	$2.40B	$2.09B	$2.18B	+15.1%
Rounds above $50M	34	23	21	+47.8%
Current capital as share of full-year 2025	90.9%	-	-	-

Is one giant cybersecurity round making 2026 look better than it really is?

The cybersecurity funding increase survives the megaround test comfortably.

Headline capital is 46.9% above last year's comparable period. Once we strip out every financing above $50 million, current funding still comes out 15.1% higher. Removing rounds above $100 million produces a similar result, with underlying capital up 13.3%.

The concentration numbers point the same way. The five largest current financings account for about 30.9% of total capital, below the 35.4% share seen last year and 36.8% two years ago.

What has changed most is the depth of the large-round group. We counted 34 financings above $50 million, compared with 23 last year, and 17 above $100 million, compared with eight.

Keyfactor's $1 billion-plus investment is the biggest current transaction we found, but it sits alongside two Cyera rounds totaling $1 billion, $550 million across two Upwind financings, Exein's $270 million round, Dream's $260 million raise and Horizon3's $250 million Series E.

The headline increase is larger than the underlying one, but the direction stays positive after the biggest deals disappear.

Are more cybersecurity startups actually getting funded, or are investors simply writing bigger checks?

Cybersecurity investors are doing both right now: funding more companies than last year and giving the successful ones larger rounds.

We found 18 more unique funded companies than in the comparable 2025 period. That is meaningful breadth. At the same time, total capital grew much faster than company count, and the typical financing rose from $15 million to $20 million.

The comparison with 2024 shows how far that change has gone. The current period contains 17 fewer funded companies than two years ago, yet those companies raised more than $2.3 billion of additional capital.

A cybersecurity company that gets funded today is therefore receiving a much larger check, on average, than a comparable funded company did two years ago.

This also explains why deal counts alone give an incomplete picture. Current activity has recovered from the softer 2025 period, while the amount of money attached to a successful financing has moved onto a much higher level.

Has cybersecurity funding simply moved toward later-stage companies?

Cybersecurity funding has not shifted heavily toward later stages by deal count; much of the extra money is showing up inside the same stage labels.

Seed and Series A make up 70.4% of current deals with a known stage, slightly above last year's 67.6%. A late-stage mix shift therefore cannot explain the jump in funding.

Series A is where the change becomes obvious. The current median is $25 million, compared with $17 million last year and $15.85 million two years ago. Series B has moved from $34 million in 2024 to $47 million in 2025 and $60 million now. Series C has reached a $100 million median.

Series C activity has also widened. We found 11 current Series C financings, compared with only four during the same period last year.

Meanwhile, Series D+ represents a smaller share of total capital than it did in either comparison period.

The market today is paying more for companies at several stages rather than relying mainly on a shift toward older companies.

Stage	Current deals	2025 deals	2024 deals	Current median round
Seed	62	55	77	$7M
Series A	50	39	46	$25M
Series B	21	25	18	$60M
Series C	11	4	9	$100M
Series D+	7	9	12	$150M
Growth Equity	8	7	9	$27.5M
Unknown	11	7	15	$16M

Can an early-stage cybersecurity startup still raise money today?

Early-stage cybersecurity startups can still get funded, although the shape of that market has changed quite a lot.

We counted 62 Seed financings, up from 55 last year, and 50 Series A rounds, up from 39. Very small rounds have recovered too: 25 current financings came in below $5 million, nearly twice last year's 13.

The weaker spot is the next band up. Deals from $5 million to below $20 million fell from 71 to 57 and now represent roughly a third of financings, down from almost half last year. Deals in the $5–20 million band falling from 71 to 57 show what investors now back and avoid, which we follow in our market report about cybersecurity.

Meanwhile, $20 million to below-$50 million rounds increased from 34 to 50.

That leaves a somewhat unusual market. New projects are still getting small checks, while startups that reach stronger commercial proof can jump into much larger financings. The conventional small venture round between those two ends is less dominant than it was recently.

We also have to keep the 2024 comparison in view. There were 42 sub-$5 million rounds two years ago, so today's rebound at the bottom still falls well short of that much broader formation environment.

Are new cybersecurity startups getting squeezed out by repeat winners?

New cybersecurity startups are still entering the funding market, but most of today's capital is going back into companies that have raised before.

We identified 53 first financings in the current period, versus 45 last year. Their share of deals barely changed, which argues against the idea that first-time fundraisers have suddenly disappeared.

The longer view is less friendly to new entrants. First financings represented 39.5% of status-known deals two years ago and 31.5% now.

The capital difference is much larger. First financings account for $677 million, while follow-on rounds account for about $7.59 billion. Follow-on median size has also climbed from $19 million two years ago to $30 million currently.

Our first-financing classification comes from a lightweight financing-history check, so we treat it as directional rather than as a perfect reconstruction of every company's lifetime funding record. Even with that limitation, the pattern is hard to miss: new companies can still get through the door, while the really large pools of capital are flowing toward startups investors already know.

Metric	Current period	2025 comparable period	2024 comparable period
Status-known deals	168	146	185
First financings	53	45	73
First-financing share	31.5%	30.8%	39.5%
Follow-on financings	115	101	112
Follow-on share	68.5%	69.2%	60.5%
Capital in first financings	$677M	$448M	$531M
Capital in follow-ons	$7.59B	$5.21B	$5.45B
Median first financing	$8M	$8M	$5M
Median follow-on financing	$30M	$25M	$19M

Why are cybersecurity rounds getting so much bigger now?

Cybersecurity rounds are getting bigger because larger checks have spread across several parts of the market instead of being confined to one late-stage corner.

The $20 million to below-$50 million bucket now contains 50 deals, versus 34 last year and 36 two years ago. At the other end, 22 financings reached at least $100 million.

The companies behind those numbers cover quite different security problems. Keyfactor raised more than $1 billion around machine identity and cryptographic infrastructure. Cyera raised $400 million and then $600 million around data and AI security. Dream raised $260 million for sovereign AI and cyber defense. Horizon3 raised $250 million around autonomous security validation, while Torq raised $140 million around AI-powered security operations.

Exein adds a very recent example outside the usual enterprise-software mold. The company raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation to secure robots, vehicles, drones and other machines running physical AI.

The bigger rounds therefore span identity, cloud, application security, autonomous testing, security operations and connected-device security.

The current median financing has reached $20 million. Looking at the distribution explains why: many more companies are reaching the part of the market where $20 million, $50 million and even $100 million-plus checks are available.

Is Identity Security where the biggest cybersecurity checks are going now?

Identity Security is currently one of the clearest places where investors are writing much bigger checks without financing more companies.

We found 25 current Identity Security deals, slightly below the 27 recorded last year. Its deal share dropped from 18.5% to 14.7%.

Capital moved sharply in the other direction, from $639 million to roughly $1.80 billion. Identity now captures 21.7% of all capital we tracked, almost twice last year's share. The median Identity round also rose from $16 million to $23 million.

Keyfactor is the standout example. The company announced a $1 billion-plus strategic growth investment around machine identity, PKI and cryptographic lifecycle management. The financing thesis was tied directly to AI-driven growth in machine identities, shorter certificate lifetimes, regulation and post-quantum migration.

The story has kept developing since that round. Keyfactor recently said annual recurring revenue had passed $200 million, after taking roughly two years to double from $100 million. It has also completed its acquisition of Cofide, extending its identity infrastructure toward cloud workloads and AI agents.

Those recent moves make the funding pattern easier to understand. Investors are paying up for companies sitting in front of a rapidly growing identity problem created by machines, software workloads and autonomous agents.

Is Cloud Security funding really surging, or is it mostly Cyera and Upwind?

Cloud Security funding is surging today, but the money is extremely concentrated around a few companies.

Cloud Security represents only 10% of current deals while absorbing 21.7% of capital. Its median round increased from $13.25 million last year to $30 million now.

Cyera accounts for a huge part of that jump. The company raised $400 million early in the year at a $9 billion valuation and followed it with another $600 million round at a $12 billion valuation. Who competes in cloud and data security, and what each player does, is shown on the market grids in our report covering the cybersecurity market.

Upwind shows the same repeat-financing dynamic. Its $250 million Series B was followed later in the year by a $300 million Series C.

Together, those four financings amount to about $1.55 billion against roughly $1.80 billion of Cloud Security capital in our current dataset.

So the category has two things happening at once. Investors are showing extraordinary conviction in cloud and data security, but most of that conviction is concentrated in companies already seen as category leaders.

Cyera's product direction makes the connection with AI even clearer today. The company has since launched Agent Guardian, aimed at discovering AI agents, mapping what data and tools they can reach and controlling risky actions at runtime.

For founders, that concentration is an important detail. Strong category totals do not mean funding conditions are equally easy for every cloud-security startup.

Is Application Security actually the broadest cybersecurity funding market right now?

Application Security currently has the widest funding base in cybersecurity, even though the biggest individual checks are landing elsewhere.

We tracked 62 Application Security deals, up from 45 last year and 54 two years ago. The category now accounts for more than a third of all current financings.

The median round has moved up too, from $12 million last year to $18.5 million.

Yet Application Security's share of total capital fell from 26.8% to 20.8%. Absolute funding still increased, but Cloud and Identity grew much faster in dollar terms.

That makes Application Security one of the better examples of broad investor activity. Many companies are getting funded across the category, while the giant checks that dominate headlines are more concentrated in other parts of cybersecurity.

The distinction is useful because category leadership depends on what we are measuring. Application Security currently leads on deal volume. Cloud and Identity are attracting much more capital relative to the number of deals they produce.

Is Network Security losing ground in cybersecurity funding?

Network Security is losing funding share, and the decline now stretches across all three comparable periods.

Network Security represented 19.0% of capital two years ago, 17.3% last year and 9.8% currently. Absolute funding has moved from about $1.14 billion to $977 million and then $814 million.

Deal count followed the same direction, from 24 to 21 and now 19.

The typical round has actually grown, reaching a $17 million median today. Investors are still willing to finance individual Network Security companies at decent sizes.

The weakness shows up in breadth and relative attention. Other categories are expanding much faster, particularly Cloud and Identity on capital and Application Security on deal count.

Among the major category changes we found, Network Security has the cleanest multi-period loss of share.

Is Managed Security Services funding getting stronger?

Managed Security Services funding is getting broader today, although the typical deal has become smaller.

We found 34 current MSS financings, up from 22 last year. Deal share increased from 15.1% to 20.0%, and capital rose from roughly $1.07 billion to $1.44 billion.

The median financing moved the other way, falling from $26 million to $16.7 million.

That makes MSS very different from Identity Security. More MSS companies are raising, while the expansion is spread across smaller checks.

This is one of the places where deal count tells us more than the headline capital figure. Investor activity has widened substantially even though the typical transaction does not look more aggressive than it did last year.

Is Europe finally becoming a serious cybersecurity funding hub?

Europe is having a much broader cybersecurity funding year, with the increase showing up across many deals rather than through one regional blockbuster.

We tracked 39 European financings in the current period, compared with 14 last year. Europe's share of deals jumped from 9.6% to 22.9%.

Capital rose from $266 million to $841 million, although Europe still receives less money per financing than North America. The European median sits at $11 million, compared with $25 million for North American deals.

Exein gives the region a fresh large-round example. The Italian security company recently raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation to expand security infrastructure for robots, vehicles, drones and other physical-AI systems.

Even after allowing for that deal, the rise from 14 European financings to 39 tells us that the regional change is much wider than one company.

Regulation is also becoming more concrete for European security buyers. The European Commission's revised Cybersecurity Act proposal focuses on ICT supply chains, secure-by-design products, certification and ENISA's role. More recently, Cyber Resilience Act reporting obligations came into force, requiring manufacturers to report actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe security incidents through the EU reporting system.

We cannot prove that regulation caused the increase in European fundraising. The timing does make product security, software supply-chain security, vulnerability management and compliance easier areas for investors to take seriously today. Which of these areas solve a problem buyers will actually pay for is something we weigh in our cybersecurity market report.

Is North America losing its lead in cybersecurity funding?

North America is losing share of cybersecurity deals while taking an even larger share of the money.

We tracked 93 North American financings, slightly below last year's 97. Because activity grew elsewhere, the region's share of deals fell from 66.4% to 54.7%.

North American companies still raised about $6.07 billion, versus $3.70 billion last year. Their share of total capital climbed to 73.0%.

The median financing moved from $15 million to $25 million.

North America therefore remains the center of gravity for large cybersecurity rounds, even as the company base becomes more geographically diverse. Europe is adding many more funded companies, while North America keeps attracting the larger checks.

That split is one of the clearer geographical changes currently underway.

Are more investors entering cybersecurity now?

Cybersecurity funding currently involves a wider set of lead investors than it did last year.

We identified 155 unique disclosed lead investors, compared with 133 during the comparable 2025 period. That increase happened even though lead-investor disclosure is slightly less complete this year.

Bessemer Venture Partners appeared as a lead or co-lead six times in our current data. Sequoia appeared five times, while Accel, Ballistic Ventures and Brightmind Partners appeared four times each.

At the same time, only 24 investors appeared as a lead on more than one current financing, versus 27 last year.

That combination points to a wider investor pool around cybersecurity rather than a tighter club controlling an increasing share of deals.

The individual names also move around quite a lot from one period to another. We would be careful about treating one absent investor as having left the market. A lead-investor table captures what happened during this particular period, not every cybersecurity investment a firm may have made.

Are corporate investors becoming more important in cybersecurity deals?

Corporate and strategic investors are showing up in fewer cybersecurity deals than last year, although the rounds they join are getting bigger.

We counted 27 current deals with a named strategic investor, compared with 34 last year. Strategic participation fell from 23.3% to 15.9% of financings.

The current rate is almost identical to the 16.1% recorded two years ago, which makes last year's level look unusually high.

Where strategic investors do appear, the median transaction has reached $29 million. That compares with $19.65 million last year and $16.9 million two years ago.

Current examples include Salesforce Ventures in Upwind and AT&T Ventures in Cyera. Those investments sit close to the investors' own cloud, software, network and enterprise technology businesses.

Corporate participation today therefore looks more selective and attached to larger deals. We do not see evidence of a broad wave of strategic investors suddenly entering every corner of cybersecurity.

Is AI actually changing where cybersecurity investors put their money?

AI is already changing where cybersecurity capital goes, especially around data access, machine identity, autonomous security operations and systems that act without a human in the loop.

Cyera is one of the clearest examples. After raising $1 billion across two current rounds, the company has kept pushing deeper into AI-agent security, including a product designed to map agents, models, tools, identities and sensitive data connections.

Keyfactor's recent financing and product moves tell a similar story from the identity side. The company is building around the growing population of non-human identities created by software workloads, machines and AI agents, while post-quantum migration creates another reason for companies to revisit cryptographic infrastructure. Growing numbers of non-human identities and post-quantum migration are forces that decide how fast cybersecurity spending grows, which we follow in our report on cybersecurity.

Torq raised $140 million around an AI-driven security operations platform. Horizon3 raised $250 million around autonomous security validation. Dream raised $260 million after building sovereign AI and cyber-defense systems for governments and critical infrastructure.

Exein stretches the theme into the physical world. Its latest funding targets security for AI-powered robots, vehicles, industrial equipment and other machines, while the company says attacks across its device network have risen sharply.

The funding data still show strength outside AI-specific products, so AI does not explain the whole cybersecurity market. But when we look at many of today's largest and fastest-repeat financings, AI repeatedly changes the security problem being funded: who or what has access, what an autonomous system can do, which data it can reach, and how quickly defenses can react.

Company	Current financing	Cybersecurity angle	What has changed
Keyfactor	$1B+	Machine identity and cryptographic infrastructure	AI agents and software workloads create many more non-human identities
Cyera	$400M	Data and AI security	Enterprises need tighter control over what AI can access
Cyera	$600M	Data, identity and agent security	Investor conviction increased again within months
Upwind	$250M	Runtime cloud security	Cloud workloads increasingly include AI systems and autonomous activity
Dream	$260M	Sovereign AI and cyber defense	Governments are funding AI-native defense infrastructure
Horizon3	$250M	Autonomous security validation	Offensive and defensive testing is becoming more automated
Torq	$140M	AI security operations	Security teams are moving investigation and response toward agents
Exein	$270M	Physical AI security	Cybersecurity is expanding into robots, vehicles and intelligent devices

Are cybersecurity companies getting funded younger these days?

Cybersecurity companies appear to be reaching meaningful funding rounds younger, although this is one finding we would treat as provisional.

Among companies with a usable founding date, the current median age at financing is 2.6 years. The comparable medians were 3.3 years last year and 3.6 years two years ago.

The pattern also appears within several stages. Current Series A companies with known founding dates have a median age of about 2.2 years, compared with 3.4 years last year. Series B moved from 6.3 years two years ago to 5.1 years last year and 3.8 years currently.

That would fit the wider picture of investors putting larger amounts into young companies that show strong traction quickly.

Our confidence is lower here than in the capital or deal-count findings. Founding dates are usable for only 119 of the 170 current deals, compared with much stronger coverage last year.

For now, we see younger funded companies as a plausible trend worth watching rather than one of the article's core conclusions.

Which cybersecurity funding numbers should we be careful with?

The big cybersecurity funding trends are solid, while a few individual transactions and classifications deserve more care.

Keyfactor is recorded as a $1 billion-plus transaction because the company announced the investment that way and did not publicly split every primary and secondary component. Our total capital figure is therefore a disclosed-value floor rather than a perfectly exact number.

Cyera's large 2025 financing reportedly included a secondary component. We retained the announced financing amount because we could not isolate a cleaner primary-only value with enough confidence.

Oak presents a timing issue. The financing appears in the current period because we use public-announcement timing consistently, although reporting around the transaction indicated that some of the capital may have been raised earlier.

Financing-history checks also have limits. One AiStrike row conflicted with an earlier round already present in our data, so we excluded that row from the first-financing calculation rather than quietly rewriting its status.

Founding dates require similar discipline. Several entries had incomplete or malformed fields, which is why our company-age analysis uses a smaller sample.

These exceptions do not materially change the broad picture. The strongest findings are supported by several independent measures, while the weaker ones, especially company age, stay clearly labeled as less certain.

What is actually changing in cybersecurity funding?

The biggest change is that cybersecurity funding has genuinely improved versus last year across both breadth and check size. More companies are raising, more deals are closing and underlying funding still comes out higher after removing the biggest rounds.

The next change is the size of a successful financing. Compared with two years ago, fewer cybersecurity companies are getting funded, yet much more capital is reaching them. The median round has almost doubled over that period. Investors are becoming more aggressive once a company clears their bar.

Large rounds are adding a lot of fuel, but current funding is spread across a much deeper group of big transactions. Keyfactor, Cyera, Upwind, Exein, Dream and Horizon3 are all part of the picture, while concentration in the top five deals is actually lower than during the previous comparison periods.

Investor attention is also rotating. Cloud and Identity Security are taking far more capital per deal, while Application Security and Managed Security Services are seeing broader deal formation. Network Security is the clearest category losing relative share.

Existing winners currently receive most of the money. First-time fundraisers have not disappeared, and their count has improved from last year, but follow-on companies command far larger checks and absorb the overwhelming majority of capital.

The freshest development is how closely cybersecurity funding is becoming tied to AI infrastructure itself. Machine identities, agent permissions, data access, autonomous security operations and physical AI now appear repeatedly around large financings. That is the strongest current direction of travel; the younger-company trend is interesting too, but the data there are much noisier.