Which cybersecurity startup is growing the fastest?
In our cybersecurity market deck, you will find everything you need to understand the market
SUMMARY
HiddenLayer is the fastest-growing cybersecurity startup we can substantiate at meaningful disclosed scale.
The key distinction is the ending revenue base. HiddenLayer says ARR grew more than 10x in a year and is now in the tens of millions of dollars, which makes the growth harder to dismiss as a tiny-base effect.
Gray Swan may actually be growing faster over the shortest period. Its ARR increased more than 10x across two quarters, but without an ending ARR figure we cannot tell whether it is outrunning HiddenLayer at comparable commercial scale.
StepSecurity has the strongest sustained percentage streak in the group. More than 5x ARR growth in two consecutive years implies more than 25x compounded growth, though the undisclosed ARR base keeps it from taking the overall lead.
Cyera wins once the comparison moves into nine-figure revenue. Its reported ARR has passed $150 million while the company says it has tripled ARR for three straight years, a much harder growth pattern to maintain at that size.
Cato Networks and Huntress show why percentage rankings can mislead. Their growth rates are lower, but the disclosed figures imply roughly $123 million and $98 million of ARR added over a year, respectively—more than the entire revenue base of many hypergrowth startups.
The leaderboard is increasingly concentrated around AI security, data security, runtime protection and software-supply-chain risk. Those categories are absorbing fresh enterprise budgets, which is giving younger vendors room to grow much faster than mature public security companies.
Funding and valuation are useful context, but they do not settle the ranking. A large round can validate investor appetite; it does not prove that a company is adding customers or recurring revenue faster than its peers.
Wiz still matters as the historical benchmark for cybersecurity hypergrowth, but Google has completed the acquisition, so it no longer belongs in a ranking of independent private startups.
For the title as written, HiddenLayer is the answer. If the question shifts to which cybersecurity startup is growing fastest after reaching serious scale, Cyera becomes the stronger choice.
This market map, featured in our cybersecurity market deck, highlights top companies and startups in the cybersecurity market
Which cybersecurity startup is growing the fastest?
Why is the fastest-growing cybersecurity startup so hard to name?
The answer changes depending on whether we rank cybersecurity startups by percentage ARR growth, recurring-revenue dollars added, or growth achieved after the company is already large.
Private cybersecurity companies disclose different versions of the same story. HiddenLayer gives us a percentage and a rough ARR range. Cyera gives us a multi-year growth claim while outside reporting supplies the latest ARR estimate. StepSecurity gives us two years of extraordinary percentage growth without the ARR base. Cato Networks and Huntress disclose enough to calculate how many recurring-revenue dollars they are adding.
That makes a pure percentage ranking too easy to game. A startup moving from $500,000 to $5 million has grown 10x. A much larger company can grow only 40% or 50% and still add well over $100 million of ARR. Both are growing fast, but they answer different versions of the question.
We therefore give the most weight to ARR growth, then check how large the business already is and whether the customer base is expanding. Valuation and funding help us understand investor appetite, but they do not decide the ranking. We also exclude Wiz from the current startup race because Google completed its acquisition earlier this year.
| Growth test | Current leader | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Fastest growth at meaningful disclosed scale | HiddenLayer | Only contender combining >10x growth with a disclosed ARR range |
| Fastest sustained percentage streak | StepSecurity | More than 5x ARR for two straight years |
| Fastest growth above $100M ARR | Cyera | Repeated hypergrowth after reaching large-company scale |
| Most ARR dollars added | Cato Networks | Roughly $123M added over a year from disclosed figures |
Is HiddenLayer the fastest-growing cybersecurity startup right now?
HiddenLayer currently has the strongest overall claim to being the fastest-growing cybersecurity startup based on the freshest comparable numbers we found.
In its latest funding announcement, HiddenLayer said annual recurring revenue had grown more than 10x over the previous year. CEO Chris Sestito told TechCrunch that ARR is now in the “tens of millions” of dollars. The exact figure remains private, but the wording gives us an important floor: HiddenLayer has moved beyond the tiny-revenue stage where almost any large contract can create a spectacular percentage.
The customer mix makes the jump more convincing. HiddenLayer says more than 50 new platform customers signed during the year, spanning securities brokerage, banking, insurance, accounting, technology, pharmaceuticals, airlines, government, and the US defense and intelligence communities. The company also says one frontier-model customer serves more than 700 million weekly users.
The latest $100 million Series B gives HiddenLayer plenty of capital, although the round itself is secondary evidence. The revenue and customer numbers are what put the company first. We found younger security companies with equally dramatic percentages, but none combined a higher verified rate with a similarly clear ending revenue range.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cybersecurity market report.
As this chart shows, and as featured in our cybersecurity market deck, search interest in cybersecurity has been trending upward
Could Gray Swan actually be growing faster than HiddenLayer?
Gray Swan could be growing faster than HiddenLayer in percentage terms, but the missing ARR base keeps Gray Swan from taking the top spot today.
Madrona, which co-led Gray Swan’s $40 million Series A, says the company grew ARR more than 10x across the previous two quarters. That pace is even more compressed than HiddenLayer’s annual comparison. If the starting revenue were already several million dollars, Gray Swan would have a serious case for first place.
Gray Swan has not disclosed the ending ARR, and that missing number blocks a clean comparison. Its other adoption numbers are impressive but cannot fill that gap. Madrona says Gray Swan’s Arena network includes more than 15,000 researchers and has generated over one million attack trajectories. The company has also been named in eleven frontier-model system cards and works with organizations including Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Amazon and Google DeepMind.
Gray Swan is clearly close to the frontier of AI security, but we still do not know how many recurring-revenue dollars sit behind that position. Huskeys is a fresh example of the same problem: The Wall Street Journal reported that its revenue has been growing fourfold quarter over quarter since commercial launch, yet the company is still a young Series A business with no disclosed ARR base. Huge percentages are easy to rank; comparable scale is much harder to establish.
For now, Gray Swan belongs immediately behind HiddenLayer on pure growth speed, with a real chance to move ahead once it discloses a meaningful ARR figure.
Does StepSecurity have the strongest sustained growth streak?
StepSecurity has the strongest multi-year percentage-growth streak we found, although HiddenLayer still gives us better evidence about current revenue scale.
StepSecurity says ARR grew more than 5x in 2024 and more than 5x again in 2025. Compounded across those two annual periods, that means ARR increased by more than 25x. Customer count also quadrupled during 2025, while adoption of its free Harden Runner product rose from about 5,000 to 10,000 public repositories.
StepSecurity is already touching enough production activity that the numbers are hard to dismiss. The company says it secures more than 13 million software builds each week. Its latest threat data also show why demand around software-supply-chain protection has become more urgent: the company counted six confirmed supply-chain attacks during one six-month stretch, then 50 across the following six and a half months.
StepSecurity says the current year is running ahead of the previous two, with far more new customers and larger enterprises entering the mix. We cannot turn that into a clean ranking because ARR remains undisclosed.
That kind of repeat hypergrowth is rare. HiddenLayer gives us the stronger current numbers; StepSecurity gives us better proof that the pace can last.
This chart, included in our cybersecurity market deck, illustrates yearly VC funding for cybersecurity startups
Is Cyera the fastest-growing big cybersecurity startup?
Cyera is currently the clearest growth leader among private cybersecurity companies already above roughly $100 million of ARR.
Cyera’s latest company disclosure says ARR has tripled for three years in a row. Separately, TechCrunch reported that Cyera had surpassed $150 million in ARR. The two disclosures are not measured at exactly the same point, so forcing them into one precise growth figure would be fake precision. Together, though, they show a company maintaining extreme growth after reaching nine-figure recurring revenue.
The customer base has moved with the revenue. Earlier this year Cyera said it was protecting data and AI environments for about 20% of the Fortune 500. In a later funding announcement, the company said it had grown to more than 1,500 employees across 18 countries and shipped more than 100 new product capabilities over the previous year.
Cyera is also spending heavily to widen the platform. It has bought several companies and recently agreed to acquire Oasis Security for about $1 billion, bringing non-human identity and AI-agent access controls into a broader data-security stack. That expansion makes Cyera harder to compare with a focused Series A or Series B startup, but it also shows that Cyera is already behaving like a broad security platform.
HiddenLayer is growing faster as a percentage. Cyera’s achievement is harder in another way: the company is still multiplying quickly after crossing $100 million ARR.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cybersecurity market report.
Is Chainguard still one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity startups?
Chainguard is still one of cybersecurity’s fastest-growing startups, although its latest verifiable pace sits below HiddenLayer and Cyera.
Fortune reported that Chainguard grew ARR sevenfold to $40 million in fiscal 2025 and expected to pass $100 million during fiscal 2026. Sacra now estimates that Chainguard reached roughly $100 million ARR, although that figure is an outside estimate rather than a fresh company disclosure.
Even if we use the $100 million estimate, the move from $40 million would represent roughly 2.5x growth—excellent at this scale, yet slower than HiddenLayer’s current pace and below Cyera’s latest multi-year tripling claim.
Chainguard also sells into a different budget. Its hardened container images, libraries and virtual-machine images are bought by engineering teams that want safer open-source components from the start. Fortune reported more than 150 customers including Canva, HPE and GitLab when the company disclosed its earlier $40 million ARR milestone.
Chainguard remains one of cybersecurity’s fastest growers once we account for size. The top of the leaderboard is simply moving faster right now.
This chart, included in our cybersecurity market deck, breaks down CrowdStrike’s playbook in cybersecurity
Are Oligo Security or Horizon3 growing fast enough to beat HiddenLayer?
Oligo Security and Horizon3 are growing extremely fast, but neither currently beats HiddenLayer on the combination of growth rate and disclosed revenue scale.
Oligo is the closer challenger by percentage. The runtime-security company says ARR grew 300% year over year, which means revenue became roughly four times as large. Oligo also raised another $60 million, bringing total funding to $140 million, and says AWS selected it as the exclusive AI runtime-security partner for Security Hub Extended. The missing piece is ARR itself.
Horizon3 gives us a clearer view of customer scale but a lower growth rate. Its latest Series E announcement says ARR grew 120% year over year while the NodeZero platform passed 7,000 customer organizations. A 120% increase means a little more than doubling, up from the 102% growth and 5,200 organizations Horizon3 had disclosed several months earlier.
The customer jump is useful: Horizon3 added roughly 1,800 organizations between those two disclosures while its growth rate accelerated from 102% to 120%. The business appears to be speeding up as it adds customers, which is more useful than the valuation jump by itself.
Oligo may eventually rank higher if it publishes its ARR base. Horizon3 already shows substantial scale. HiddenLayer still clears both on the evidence available now.
Do Cato Networks and Huntress win if we count ARR dollars instead?
Cato Networks and Huntress win this version of the race: both jump ahead if we rank cybersecurity startups by recurring-revenue dollars added in a year.
Cato recently said ARR had passed $415 million after growing 42% year over year. Those figures imply a prior-year base of about $292 million and roughly $123 million of ARR added in twelve months. Cato also says it now serves more than 4,800 customers and signed several multimillion-dollar ARR contracts during its latest quarter.
Huntress has a similar story. The company recently passed $250 million ARR with 65% year-over-year growth. That implies a prior base around $152 million and approximately $98 million of ARR added. Huntress also reports 130% net revenue retention, more than 270,000 businesses protected, 15 million identities and 5.5 million endpoints.
Those dollar additions are larger than the entire current revenue base of many hypergrowth startups. A 40%-to-65% rate can therefore produce more new business than a 10x rate at a much smaller company.
| Company | Latest ARR | YoY growth | Approx. ARR added |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cato Networks | >$415M | 42% | ~$123M |
| Huntress | >$250M | 65% | ~$98M |
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cybersecurity market report.
This chart, included in our cybersecurity market deck, illustrates yearly funding for cybersecurity startups
Are AI-security startups taking over the cybersecurity growth leaderboard?
Private cybersecurity’s fastest growth today is heavily concentrated around AI security, data security, runtime protection and software-supply-chain risk.
HiddenLayer protects models, agents and AI workflows. Gray Swan focuses on AI red-teaming and runtime defense. Cyera has expanded from data security into AI usage, identity and agent controls. Oligo is pushing runtime protection for applications and AI systems. Even Chainguard is benefiting from the need to trust the open-source components that automated development systems increasingly pull into production.
The market around these companies is expanding just as quickly. Gartner estimates cited by TechCrunch put enterprise spending on AI-security products at about $2.83 billion this year, up 83% from the previous year, with nearly $4.8 billion expected the following year. An 83% annual jump is unusually fast for an enterprise-security category.
The contrast with larger public cybersecurity vendors is useful. SentinelOne’s latest quarterly report showed ARR growth of 22% at more than $1.2 billion. At public-company scale, 22% is healthy; the private AI-security leaders are operating in a part of the market where budgets are still being created from scratch.
For now, the concentration at the top looks durable. Companies securing AI agents, models, data and runtime behavior are growing into a budget pool that barely existed a few years ago.
Is HiddenLayer’s growth mostly coming from new customers?
HiddenLayer says more than 90% of its recent ARR increase came from new customers, so the current growth burst is mostly coming from fresh demand.
That detail is more useful than another funding number. A startup can expand quickly when a few early customers suddenly spend much more. HiddenLayer says the overwhelming majority of its increase came from customers that were new to the platform, and the company signed more than 50 of them during the year.
The industries are also spread out. Financial services and large technology companies are the biggest verticals, while the disclosed customer set reaches pharmaceuticals, airlines, government, defense and intelligence. That mix lowers the chance that one temporary spending pocket explains the whole jump.
Huntress gives us a useful contrast. Its 130% net revenue retention shows that existing customers are spending more over time. HiddenLayer is currently relying much more heavily on new customers.
For a young category, that is encouraging. It suggests companies are entering AI security for the first time rather than a small group of early adopters simply buying more.
This chart, included in our cybersecurity market deck, compares the main business model options for XDR and MDR cybersecurity vendors
Can HiddenLayer keep growing this fast?
HiddenLayer is very unlikely to keep multiplying ARR at anything close to tenfold once the company becomes much larger.
The arithmetic gets unrealistic almost immediately. Repeating 10x growth for three more years multiplies a company’s starting ARR by 1,000. No enterprise-security business can keep that curve going for long.
The real test is whether HiddenLayer can follow the path we have seen at Cyera: percentage growth falls as the base gets bigger, but the number of ARR dollars added keeps rising. Reaching nine-figure ARR while still doubling or tripling would be a far more useful milestone than preserving an eye-catching percentage on a smaller base.
HiddenLayer has one advantage going into that transition. As discussed above, most of the current expansion is coming from new customers, which leaves room for those accounts to grow again when they renew.
We should expect the headline percentage to fall sharply. If dollar growth continues to accelerate, HiddenLayer will still look like a winner.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cybersecurity market report.
Why isn’t Wiz still the fastest-growing cybersecurity startup?
Wiz is still the benchmark for cybersecurity hypergrowth, but Wiz is no longer an independent startup we can rank against HiddenLayer, Cyera or Gray Swan.
Google completed the acquisition earlier this year, and Alphabet now reports Wiz inside Google Cloud. The final purchase price in Alphabet’s filings was about $29.5 billion after adjustments.
Before the acquisition, Wiz had already established the reference case for speed in cybersecurity. The company reached $100 million ARR in roughly 18 months and was already around $500 million by mid-2024, according to TechCrunch. Few enterprise-software companies have compressed that much growth into such a short period.
Wiz still gives us a useful benchmark. Cyera’s repeated tripling at nine-figure scale and HiddenLayer’s current breakout look even more unusual when we put them next to the pace Wiz set.
For the title of this article, though, Wiz has left the field.
This chart, featured in our cybersecurity market deck, illustrates revenue distribution by customer segment in the cybersecurity market
Which cybersecurity startups are really in the top growth tier now?
HiddenLayer, Gray Swan, StepSecurity, Cyera, Chainguard, Oligo and Horizon3 form the clearest current top tier, but each leads on a different version of growth.
HiddenLayer has the cleanest mix of extreme current percentage growth and a disclosed revenue range. Gray Swan may be faster over the shortest period, although its ARR base is hidden. StepSecurity owns the strongest two-year streak. Cyera stands out once we require nine-figure ARR. Chainguard has already shown that hypergrowth can survive the transition toward $100 million. Oligo is moving at roughly 4x, while Horizon3 is accelerating above 100% with thousands of customers.
Cato and Huntress sit just outside that percentage-growth group, yet both are adding so many dollars that excluding them entirely would give a distorted picture of what “fast” means in cybersecurity.
| Company | Best recent growth evidence | Scale evidence | Our read |
|---|---|---|---|
| HiddenLayer | Fastest disclosed annual ARR growth | Meaningful ARR range disclosed | Best overall current claim |
| Gray Swan | >10x ARR in two quarters | ARR undisclosed | Could be faster, scale still unclear |
| StepSecurity | Two straight years of hypergrowth | ARR undisclosed; 13M builds/week | Best sustained percentage streak |
| Cyera | Sustained multi-year hypergrowth | >$150M ARR reported externally | Fastest at large startup scale |
| Chainguard | 7x to $40M in FY2025 | ~$100M ARR estimated | Strong growth for its size |
| Oligo Security | 300% YoY ARR growth | ARR undisclosed | Major challenger, missing base |
| Horizon3 | Growth is still accelerating | 7,000+ organizations | Fast and increasingly proven |
So which cybersecurity startup is growing the fastest?
HiddenLayer is currently the fastest-growing cybersecurity startup we can substantiate at meaningful disclosed scale.
As seen above, HiddenLayer’s ARR grew more than 10x over the latest year and finished in the tens of millions of dollars. The ending scale is what separates HiddenLayer from most of the louder hypergrowth claims. Gray Swan and a few very young companies may be moving even faster in percentage terms, but they have not disclosed enough revenue scale for us to make a clean comparison.
Cyera gets the second, equally important distinction. Cyera is the fastest-growing large cybersecurity startup we found: the company says ARR has tripled for three straight years, while outside reporting puts current ARR above $150 million. Cato Networks wins a different race by adding roughly $123 million of ARR over a year, and Huntress is close behind at roughly $98 million.
The ranking changes with the metric, which is exactly why one funding announcement or one growth percentage cannot settle the original question.
For the title as written, our answer is HiddenLayer. If the question becomes “which cybersecurity startup is growing fastest after reaching serious scale?”, the answer shifts to Cyera.
If you want more recent data on this point, please see our latest cybersecurity market report.
This chart, included in our cybersecurity market deck, shows how identity verification platform technology has evolved over time
OUR METHODOLOGY
This analysis asks a deceptively simple question: which cybersecurity startup is growing the fastest? We did not rely on one headline growth rate. We broke the question into the dimensions that actually change the answer: recent ARR growth, the revenue base behind that growth, recurring-revenue dollars added, persistence across multiple periods, customer and adoption expansion, and the stage at which the growth is happening.
We gave the most weight to ARR growth, then checked whether the ending scale was meaningful. A 10x increase from a tiny base and a 3x increase above $100 million ARR are both exceptional, but they are not the same achievement. We therefore looked separately at companies already operating at nine-figure ARR, where maintaining hypergrowth becomes a much harder test.
For each company, we prioritized the freshest operating evidence we could substantiate. Company disclosures and direct executive statements were preferred for ARR, growth and customer metrics; high-quality reporting was used where private companies had not published the underlying figure themselves. Funding rounds and valuations were treated as context, not as substitutes for commercial performance.
When a company disclosed a very large percentage increase but not the underlying ARR base, we kept it in the comparison but did not treat the percentage as fully comparable with a company that disclosed both rate and scale. In those cases, customer count, deployments, protected environments, production usage and similar adoption measures helped us judge whether the growth was happening on a meaningful base.
Where we estimate ARR added, the figure is our reconstruction rather than a company-reported metric. We back into the previous-period ARR from the disclosed current ARR and growth rate, then use the difference as an approximate comparison. That is how we arrive at figures such as roughly $123 million of ARR added for Cato Networks and roughly $98 million for Huntress.
The current ranking is restricted to independent private cybersecurity companies. Acquired companies can still be useful benchmarks, which is why Wiz appears in the analysis, but Google’s completed acquisition removes Wiz from the active startup race.
The final judgment is not a mechanical score. We aggregated the evidence point by point and gave more weight to recent growth that could be tied to demonstrable commercial scale. That is why HiddenLayer leads the title question, while Cyera leads once the bar moves to sustained growth at nine-figure ARR.
Key sources used for this analysis include: HiddenLayer’s Series B announcement, TechCrunch on HiddenLayer’s ARR range and new-customer mix, Madrona on Gray Swan’s >10x ARR growth, StepSecurity on two consecutive years of >5x ARR growth, TechCrunch on Cyera surpassing $150 million ARR, Fortune on Chainguard’s sevenfold ARR increase, Horizon3 on 120% ARR growth and 7,000+ customer organizations, Cato Networks on >$415 million ARR and 42% growth, Huntress on >$250 million ARR, 65% growth and 130% NRR, and Google on the completed Wiz acquisition.
In our cybersecurity market deck, we identify pain points entrepreneurs should prioritize
Related blog posts
- Which cybersecurity startups generate the most revenue today?
