Cyber Startup Landscape - Bay Area
The past decade has led to considerable growth of the cybersecurity sector and, as a result, to a dynamic environment for startups. New trends, innovations and technologies in the area of cybersecurity and the corresponding key technologies will therefore have a significant impact on the future. For this reason, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the Agentur für Innovation in der Cybersicherheit GmbH “Innovation for Cybersecurity” (Cyberagentur) publish this Cyber Startup Landscape of the Bay Area to provide an overview of the most relevant startups, technologies, and trends in cybersecurity.
The landscape published within the study “ Cyber Startup Landscape - Bay Area” was created by leveraging a mix of databases that provided the relevant insights into cyber startups across the Bay Area. Data collection was focused on cybersecurity startups with a deep tech focus, meaning that these startups require significant resources and funding for technological research and development in contrast to e.g., user research, business model innovations, or consulting services.
This resulted in the inclusion of 437 startups that meet these criteria. Overall, these startup companies vary greatly in their attributes such as size, age, maturity, and technical specifications. Furthermore, the startups found in this landscape have been thematically grouped into four main clusters: Digital Infrastructure Security, Personal Digital Security, Security Analytics, and Operational Technology & Application Security. Moreover, each startup has been assorted to one of the 19 subclusters that serve as a bottom-up structure to navigate this landscape, after which the conducted analysis identified seven key technologies that startups mention the use of to some extent. These include Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Image Recognition, Blockchain Infrastructure, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud Technology, Quantum Computing, and Big Data. While Cloud Technology dominated the startups technology references, it is important to notice that Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning was featured steadily across the main clusters, following the trend of many industries to adapt this powerful technology in the future. Quantum Computing remained the least referenced technology, indicating that despite its low maturity the first business applications for the technology will start to appear on the market soon.
With all 437 startups grouped and connected to relevant key technologies, we derived a total of 44 startups as samples to be presented on our landscape. Sample selection criteria ranged from the rate of patent registrations to unique technology combinations within the offered solutions. The remaining 44 startups were chosen to represent the broad variety of perspectives in cybersecurity and are therefore analyzed in this study.