Aug 5, 2026: Dr. Chenxi Wang joined NVIDIA Senior Director of Engineering Jasmine Jaksic at Black Hat to discuss how AI agents are actually moving from experimentation into enterprise production, drawing on Chenxi’s interviews with 28 AI leaders across global enterprises and Jasmine’s practitioner experience at NVIDIA.

Key findings: successful use cases tend to be bounded, high-volume, repeatable, auditable, and reversible; autonomy exists on a spectrum; and long-horizon agentic tasks are emerging as the next frontier.

Biggest takeaway: scaled agentic adoption will require a mature enterprise control plane for agent identity, authorization, control, observability, and accountability.

Rain Capital Selected for the 2026 RAISE Select Cohort

Aug 7, 2026: Rain Capital was selected for the 2026 RAISE Select cohort, joining 101 emerging managers chosen by the RAISE Global LP Selection Committee, made up of 70+ leading LPs.

The recognition reflects Rain’s focus on partnering with early-stage founders building at the frontier of cybersecurity, healthtech, and AI infrastructure.

Rain will join the RAISE community and 330+ LPs at the RAISE Global Summit on October 22 at the Presidio in San Francisco.

Chenxi Wang Named One of the Top 10 Influential Women in Cybersecurity

EM360Tech named Chenxi one of its Top 10 Influential Women in Cybersecurity for 2026.

The recognition highlights Chenxi’s work across cybersecurity, AI, and venture capital, from investing in the next generation of security companies to contributing to industry conversations around emerging technology.

Brief congratulations + Rain perspective; keep this section short since it is primarily a recognition announcement rather than a major story.

View the full list

Chenxi on ISMG: The Future of AI and Cybersecurity

Chenxi sat down with Tom Field of ISMG at Black Hat to discuss how the rapid evolution of AI is reshaping cybersecurity, enterprise technology, and investing.

Key themes included AI accelerating both attack and defense, agents moving toward greater autonomy, and the importance of open-weight AI and global talent to U.S. competitiveness.

Chenxi also discussed universities as an important source of breakthrough AI innovation and why, in a market moving this quickly, exceptional founders can matter more than perfectly timing the market.

Watch the full video

Latest Podcast: Security in the Age of AI Acceleration

David B. Cross, Venture Partner at Rain Capital and CISO, joined the hosts of the Cyber Smokehouse in exposing how the rapid acceleration of AI is fundamentally destabilizing traditional enterprise defenses. As adversaries deploy autonomous models, security teams now face a wave of machine-speed, agentic threats that completely outpace legacy controls. Manual oversight and static rules are no longer enough to monitor, detect, and contain these complex, self-directed vectors.

Major Takeaway: This is precisely where Guardian Agents like Manifold become critical, delivering the real-time visibility and active governance needed to secure automated environments. Embracing these advanced protective frameworks is essential for CISOs aiming to stay ahead of the next generation of AI-driven attacks.

The Cyber Smokehouse

Here’s what’s happening across the Rain ecosystem.

Permiso Security Joins Okta

July 30, 2026: Permiso Security, a Rain Capital portfolio company, announced that it is joining Okta, marking Rain Capital’s sixth portfolio exit in just nine months. Media reports valued the acquisition at nearly $200 million.

Congratulations to Jason Martin, Paul Nguyen, Phanikrishna Modali, and the entire Permiso team!

Permiso has built identity threat detection and response technology designed to help organizations detect and respond to threats across human, machine, and AI identities. As enterprises increasingly adopt AI agents and other non-human identities, securing how these identities access and interact with critical systems is becoming more important than ever.

By joining Okta, Permiso will bring its threat detection technology and security research expertise to a broader identity security platform.

We’re proud to have backed the Permiso team early and excited to see what they build in this next chapter.

Read the Announcement

Better Auth Joins Vercel

July 7, 2026: Better Auth, a Rain Capital portfolio company, announced that it is joining Vercel. The milestone marked Rain Capital’s fifth portfolio exit in eight months.

Founder Bereket Engida built Better Auth around a simple idea: authentication should be easy to use, open source, and platform agnostic. It quickly grew into one of the most active authentication projects on GitHub, with strong adoption across the developer community.

Vercel shares Better Auth’s commitment to keeping authentication open source and framework agnostic. Together, the teams will continue building authentication infrastructure for developers across the modern application ecosystem.

Congratulations to the Better Auth team on this exciting next chapter!

Read the Announcement

Rain Officially Welcomes Dr. David Brumley as Venture Partner

We are thrilled to officially welcome Dr. David Brumley as Rain Capital’s newest Venture Partner.

David is one of the rare people who has successfully bridged the worlds of frontier research, entrepreneurship, and industry. He is a Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, founder of Mayhem Security, and currently serves as Chief AI Officer at Bugcrowd, where he is helping shape the future of AI-powered cybersecurity.

Many in the security community also know David for his pioneering research in program analysis, software security, and more recently ExploitBench – an open benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate how well AI systems discover, understand, and exploit software vulnerabilities. As AI becomes a first-class engineering tool, benchmarks like ExploitBench will play an increasingly important role in measuring what these systems can actually do.

At Rain, David will help us identify the next generation of exceptional AI and cybersecurity founders, evaluate emerging technical breakthroughs, and work closely with our portfolio companies. His combination of academic depth, founder experience, and practical industry leadership is exactly the perspective we want around the table.

The Rain team is excited to partner with David as we continue backing the entrepreneurs building the infrastructure of the AI era.

Welcome to the Rain team, David!

Dr. Chenxi Wang Ranked #5 Worldwide Among Women Cybersecurity Creators on LinkedIn

Favikon ranked Rain Capital Founder and General Partner Dr. Chenxi Wang #5 worldwide among women cybersecurity professionals on LinkedIn.

Dr. Chenxi Wang has been a consistent voice across cybersecurity, venture capital, and enterprise infrastructure. Her writing has helped create thoughtful conversations around the issues shaping the future of security, from AI’s impact on defense to the importance of building stronger communities across the cyber ecosystem.

At Rain Capital, we believe the cybersecurity industry is strengthened by more women founders, investors, operators, and technical leaders helping shape the future of the field. Chenxi’s recognition is a meaningful reminder of the importance of visible, substantive voices in cyber.

We are proud to see her recognized alongside so many impressive women moving the cybersecurity community forward!

Minimus Makes Hardened Container Image Libraries Free to Use

Rain Capital’s portfolio company Minimus announced the launch of Minimus Community Edition, making its library of near-zero CVE container images available for free without licensing fees, trials, signups, or an auth wall.

The Community Edition includes the Minimus image gallery, major and minor versions, hardened minimal images, compliance-oriented images across standards including FIPS, CIS, NIST SP 800-190, and STIG, as well as full SBOM and vulnerability visibility.

Secure container images should be easy to access, evaluate, and adopt. By removing the procurement and licensing barriers that often stand between developers and hardened infrastructure, Minimus is making secure-by-default container images accessible to a much broader developer community.

Explore Community Edition

Humans vs. AI: Black Hat After Dark

August 5, 2026: Rain Capital is co-hosting Humans vs AI: Black Hat After Dark at Jimmy Kimmel’s Comedy Club in Las Vegas, bringing together ~100 hand-picked founders, CISOs, investors, and security leaders during Black Hat.

Hosted by Dr. Chenxi Wang, Sachin Bansal, and Jon Garside, the evening will feature cybersecurity leaders including Allan Alford, Bil Harmer, Joe Sullivan, Troy Wilkinson, Olivier Roth Newbury, Joe Bernik, and Joshua Copeland.

After dinner and cocktails, the leaders will take the stage for one-minute comedy sets alongside professional comedians and an AI robot determined to prove it has the best jokes.

The event is co-hosted with Schellman, BlackCloak, Securin, Chainguard, Straiker, and OX Security.

Join Us at Black Hat

Straiker Series A Celebration

Rain Capital joined the Straiker team at Rosewood Sand Hill to celebrate their $64M Series A raise.

One of the best parts of being an early investor is getting to celebrate moments like this alongside the founders. Rain has had a front-row seat to Straiker’s journey and has been incredibly impressed by how the team continues to execute and push the company forward.

As AI agents move from experiments to production, enterprises need security infrastructure built for a new attack surface: reasoning, identity, memory, tools, data, and autonomous actions. Straiker is building for that shift and helping define what AI security looks like for the agentic enterprise.

Congratulations to Ankur Shah, Sreenath Kurupati, and the entire Straiker team on this incredible milestone. We are proud to be part of the journey and excited for what’s next!

Latest Podcast: The Future of Cyber Threats

David B. Cross, Venture Partner at Rain Capital and CISO, joined Security Confidential to discuss how AI is fundamentally reshaping both software development and cybersecurity. Drawing on decades of experience leading security at Oracle, Microsoft, and Google Cloud, David shares why organizations must rethink risk management, simplify security operations, and embrace AI as a force multiplier rather than just another tool.

The Takeaway:

He underscores that just as endpoint security became a non-negotiable standard for enterprise environments, every organization today needs a Guardian agent, such as those provided by Manifold and Straiker to continuously govern and safeguard their autonomous agentic ecosystems.

Listen Here

June 29, 2026: Straiker AI, one of Rain Capital’s portfolio companies, announced a massive $64M Series A raise today.

As one of Straiker’s seed investors, Rain has been involved with the company since its earliest days. We are proud to be one of Straiker’s seed investors and continues to support the company in the Series A raise. It is exciting to see the market recognize what has become increasingly obvious: AI security is no longer a niche category – it’s a foundational enterprise infrastructure.

As agents move from experiments to production, the attack surface shifts from code to reasoning, identity, memory, and autonomous actions. Straiker’s technology allows them to secure the entire AI stack, from code to agents to applications and models.

We are especially impressed with Straiker’s STAR research lab, led by Girish Chandrasekar. STAR has been leading the field on offensive AI research. STAR’s findings have contributed to Open-source AI security and helped to build the guardrails and protection that underlines tomorrow’s autonomous systems and applications.

Congratulations to Ankur Shah, Sreenath Kurupati, and the entire Straiker team for the massive raise. Can’t wait to see what you do next, Straiker!

Read the Announcement

Accenture to Acquire runZero in a $4.2 bn Deal to Assemble a Modern xOT Security Platform

June 18, 2026: Accenture announced plans to acquire runZero, a Rain Capital portfolio company, alongside NetRise and a majority stake in Dragos, in a combined transaction valued at approximately $4.2 billion. Rain Capital first invested in runZero at the Series A and witnessed the company’s growth into a leading exposure management solution across IT, OT, and cloud assets.

The transaction reflects a larger shift in how enterprises and governments are thinking about critical infrastructure defense. Operational environments spanning industrial control systems, IoT devices, sensors, cloud-connected devices, and related IT infrastructure are now referred to as xOT. As xOT environments become more connected, the boundary between digital compromise and physical disruption becomes harder to separate.

runZero’s platform helps organizations uncover unknown and unmanaged assets that traditional tools often miss, giving defenders a more complete view of what exists across their attack surface.

For critical infrastructure operators, visibility is the foundation to defense. The ability to understand every asset, assess exposure continuously, and connect that visibility to detection and response is increasingly central to defending xOT systems.

We are proud to have been part of the journey with runZero and wish the team best of luck in their new journey with Accenture.

Read the Announcement

Clario Launches From Stealth to Address Enterprise Data ROT

Clario, a Rain Capital portfolio company, launched from stealth with $6 million in seed funding to tackle one of the most persistent blockers in enterprise AI adoption: data ROT: redundant, obsolete, and trivial files that quietly accumulate across enterprise systems.

40% of enterprise data is estimated to be ROT – duplicate and obsolete data can turn enterprise knowledge bases into noisy, unreliable inputs for AI systems. It also leads to unnecessary operational costs.

Founders Yousuf Khan and Madhu Vohra bring decades of enterprise operating experience to the problem. Yousuf is a five-time CIO and former CISO who has spent over 20 years leading enterprise technology organizations, while Madhu is a veteran engineering leader with leadership roles at Oracle, NetApp, Nutanix, and VMware, where she built large-scale enterprise storage and infrastructure systems. Together, they are solving a problem they experienced firsthand: enterprise data sprawl has become one of the biggest barriers to successful AI adoption.

Clario uses AI to identify and manage data ROT with human guidance. Its outcome-based model keeps costs low while improving enterprise data hygiene. Their mission is to build the trusted data foundation for AI adoption at scale.

Congratulations, Yousuf and Madhu!

Read the feature

Forte Group Co-Hosts Black Hat(HER) Executive Dinner in San Francisco

Forte Group co-hosted the inaugural Black Hat(HER) Executive Dinner in San Francisco, bringing together women leaders across cybersecurity for an evening of conversation and community.

The discussion centered on issues shaping the future of security, including AI’s impact on cyber defense, human safety and privacy, and the importance of building stronger networks for women across the industry.

Thank you to Black Hat and Brittany Buza for bringing this community together. We are excited to support the continued growth of Black Hat(HER) and the leaders helping move cybersecurity forward.

The Forte Group will be joining forces with Black Hat(HER) for another event at the US Blackhat in August.

Black Hat USA 2026

Gartner Summit Takeaway: Who is Watching Your AI?

The headline out of the recent Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit was clear: AI is evolving far too fast for human oversight, forcing a major shift toward Agentic Security and the rapid rise of “Guardian Agents.” The consensus from the summit? It takes an AI to govern an AI.

The Supervision Mandate

Traditional security perimeters cannot police autonomous code. The new mandate requires deploying Guardian Agents which are specialized AI tools or LLMs designed strictly to monitor, supervise, and enforce strict safety boundaries on your operational AI teammates.

The Core Reality: AI agents cannot be trusted implicitly to stay within their guardrails. If you have an AI workforce, you need an automated, independent AI supervisor ensuring agents do not violate policies or exhibit rogue behavior.

View the official website

Latest Podcast: Security in the Age of AI Acceleration

In this episode of the Cyber Smokehouse podcast, Atlassian CISO and Rain Capital Venture Partner David Cross explores the shifting security landscape where generative AI significantly reduces friction for attackers while increasing the frequency of threats. He shares a critical buyer’s perspective for the CISO community, noting that traditional defense models are becoming outdated.

This shift creates a unique opportunity for new ventures to focus on AI-driven automation for essential security operations. Viewers can better understand how enterprise leaders calculate the value of new technologies, providing a clear roadmap for identifying robust infrastructure over simple AI integrations in today’s market.

Listen to the podcast

Astrix Security is being acquired by Cisco in a reported ~$400M acquisition, marking Rain Capital’s third exit in six months, following Lakera’s acquisition by Check Point Software Technologies and SPLX’s acquisition by Zscaler.

As enterprises adopt AI agents and autonomous systems, non-human identities are emerging as a critical layer to protect. Astrix built visibility and control for this new category, helping enterprises secure and govern non-human access across agents, APIs, and service accounts across modern enterprise environments.

Cisco plans to integrate Astrix into its broader security and Zero Trust platform, reinforcing the growing importance of identity, access, and runtime control in the AI-native enterprise.

Rain Capital is a seed investor in Astrix and very proud to have witnessed the innovation and growth led by founders Alon Jackson and Idan Gour.

Read the full press release

AI Vulnerability Storm: A System-Level Shock

Anthropic’s Mythos release shocked the Cybersecurity industry. The Cloud Security Alliance, together with SANS and OWASP, published a report — “AI Vulnerability Storm” — as a response to Mythos.

LLM models like Mythos that are customized for security tasks represent a step-change in AI-driven vulnerability research — they fundamentally changed the nature of vulnerability discovery and management

• Vulnerability discovery moves from scarce to continuous

• Exploit generation moves from manual to automated

• Time from discovery to exploitation compresses from weeks to hours

As attackers scale with compute while defense remains constrained by patch cycles and coordination, the implication becomes structural. Security teams can no longer rely on a “good enough” security program. This paper outlined a "Mythos-ready" security program built around three priorities: adjusting risk calculations; doubling down on security fundamentals like segmentation, MFA, and defense-in-depth; and immediately deploying LLM-based vulnerability discovery capabilities.

Read the full whitepaper

Rain’s Venture Partner Dr. David Brumley Launches ExploitBench

Rain Venture Partner and Carnegie Mellon University Professor Dr. David Brumley, together with Ph.D. student Seunghyun Lee, recently launched ExploitBench, a new benchmark measuring how far AI systems can progress through real-world software exploitation workflows.

Unlike traditional benchmarks focused on vulnerability discovery alone, ExploitBench evaluates the full exploitation ladder — from triggering bugs to achieving arbitrary code execution against hardened production systems.

Several findings stood out:

• Claude Mythos Preview achieved full arbitrary code execution on 21 of 41 V8 vulnerabilities

• GPT-5.5 was the only other model family to reach full ACE capability on selected CVEs

• Exploitation performance varied significantly depending on the surrounding agent harness and runtime scaffolding

The takeaway: Autonomous AI systems can execute multi-stage offensive workflows beyond simple detection. We have officially entered the AI exploit era.

Explore ExploitBench

When AI Acts: Security and Survival in the Age of Enterprise Agents

At RSA 2026, Rain Capital’s Founder and General Partner, Dr. Chenxi Wang, joined a panel with Jasmine Jaksic (NVIDIA), Qi Jin (Cerebras), and Emrecan Dogan (Glean) to discuss how agentic AI is moving from experimentation into enterprise production.

A clear theme emerged: as systems become more autonomous, the challenge is no longer just model performance, but how to design for trust, control, and decision-making in production.

Several ideas stood out:

• Time-to-decision is becoming a key metric as systems increasingly act in real time

• Trust is shifting toward probabilistic outputs, changing how enterprises think about risk and oversight

• How to measure success remains an open question beyond traditional model benchmarks

• Security is moving to the agent runtime layer, where actions actually happen

The takeaway: Enterprises are decidedly moving from model-centric systems toward decision-driven, agentic architectures

Cybersecurity Funding: A Barbell Market with Rising Execution Risk

At RSA, Our Venture Partner Sidra Ahmed Lefort spoke with ISMG about what’s happening beneath the surface in cybersecurity funding.

While headline numbers remain strong, with over $16B in financing and $80B in M&A, the underlying dynamics are more nuanced.

A few patterns stood out:

• Capital is concentrating at the extremes
  A clear barbell effect is emerging, with large seed rounds and mega-acquisitions at both ends, while Series B and C remain more constrained. This is creating real execution risk for companies in the middle.

• Overcapitalization can become a liability
  More capital does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. When urgency fades, prioritization becomes harder and execution suffers.

• M&A remains the primary exit path
  The pool of acquirers is expanding, particularly as infrastructure companies become more active.

• Second-time founders are increasingly advantaged
  Experience and execution track record are commanding outsized trust and capital.

The takeaway: Capital is available, but discipline and execution matter more than ever.

Watch the full interview

Latest Podcast: Is Your AI Just “Snacking”?

David B. Cross, Venture Partner at Rain Capital, recently shared how the current landscape marks a definitive shift from “bolted-on” AI features to truly AI-native architectures. This evolution requires moving beyond “snacking” which are minor, fragmented experiments and toward “full meals” that fundamentally transform business operations. In this new era, the security organization is no longer a rigid gatekeeper of compliance but a customer-centric engine designed to enable speed. Investors should look for organizations that can move beyond simple pilots to integrate AI into their core operational fabric, ensuring that security is a driver of enterprise productivity rather than a bottleneck.

The takeaway: The rise of autonomous agents necessitates a major overhaul of identity governance, where AI entities are treated with the same, if not more, rigor as human users. While unauthorized access remains a concern, the greater systemic risk has shifted toward massive data oversharing within internal networks. However, the defensive capabilities are keeping pace; advanced AI-driven security strategies are now capable of automatically remediating over half of the vulnerabilities found in AI-generated code. This move toward self-healing software supply chains represents the next frontier, turning security into a proactive, automated layer that protects the speed of modern innovation.

YouTube Interview

In January, Openclaw took the world by storm. These Computer Use Agents (CUA) replaced passive chatbots with fully autonomous agents, capable of executing complex workflows, accessing sensitive systems, and modifying infrastructure without direct human oversight.

For security professionals, this signals the arrival of a new security baseline: AI agent security is becoming a foundational layer of the modern enterprise stack.

This shift requires a rethinking of core security pillars: Identity, Posture, and Observability. Agents must be treated as high-risk identities with tightly scoped permissions, continuous posture management, and always-on monitoring and verification of every decision made.

Our portfolio company, Straiker.AI, is building key control pieces for this new reality. Straiker provides offensive red-teaming capabilities to stress-test agent logic as well as controls for posture and threat management. Straiker is now one of the fastest growing AI security companies — their customers now include global enterprises and some of the most decorated frontier labs.

Read the Straiker Tech Blog

Rain Capital’s Enterprise Agentic Adoption Panel at upcoming RSAC

As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, the question of autonomy is becoming increasingly central to enterprise risk management.

At RSA Conference 2026, Rain Capital Founder and General Partner Dr. Chenxi Wang will join Qi Jin (Cerebras), Jasmine Jaksic (NVIDIA), and Emrecan Dogan (Glean) for a panel discussion titled “When AI Acts: Security and Survival in the Age of Enterprise Agents.” The session will take place on March 24 at 2:25 PM.

The panel will explore how enterprises are designing safeguards for increasingly autonomous systems, including human oversight mechanisms, permission boundaries, escalation triggers, and operational kill switches.

View Session Details

Claroty Secures $150 Million Series F to Advance CPS Protection

Claroty, a Rain portfolio company and a leader in cyber-physical systems protection, announced a $150 million Series F round led by Golub Growth, with participation from existing investors.

The financing reflects the growing urgency around securing mission-critical infrastructure across energy, manufacturing, healthcare, and the public sector, as cyber threats increasingly translate into operational and physical disruption.

As ransomware activity, geopolitical tensions, and AI adoption accelerate, CPS protection is becoming a core enterprise requirement. Claroty continues to advance a platform approach spanning asset visibility, exposure management, network protection, secure access, and threat detection, addressing the need for operational resilience at scale.

Read Claroty Press Release

Lema Raises $24 Million to Transform Third-Party Risk with Agentic AI

Lema, a Rain portfolio company, emerged from stealth with $24 million in funding. The Series A was led by Team8, following a Seed round led by F2 Venture Capital with participation from Rain and Salesforce Ventures.

Modern enterprises rely on thousands of external vendors, yet vendor risk management remains largely compliance-driven and static. Traditional questionnaires and point-in-time assessments fail to reflect how vendors actually access systems, move data, and introduce risk within the enterprise environment.

Lema’s agentic AI platform provides continuous analysis of vendor behavior and dynamic verification of access and risks. By mapping real access pathways and tracking changes over time, it provides security teams with a just-in-time view of third-party exposure and actionable risk reduction.

View Business Insider Article

David Cross Wins New Resilient Awards

We are thrilled to share that Rain Capital Venture Partner David B. Cross has been named a finalist for the inaugural Resilient CISO Award by SC Media. This new category recognizes transformational leaders who have evolved the CISO role into a cornerstone of business strategy and enterprise-wide resilience. As the Chief Information Security Officer at Atlassian, David continues to set the standard for navigating today’s complex threat landscape with vision and adaptability. We are incredibly proud to have his world-class expertise on our team, and we look forward to the winner announcements at the RSA Conference on March 24!

SC Awards Finalsts

CISO Insights Podcast

David Cross did a recent CISO Insights podcast interview that shared a number of interesting insights with the community. David made a compelling case that the era of the policy-only executive is over and the “Technical CISO” is now essential. He dismantles the fear-mongering around automation, framing AI as a “force multiplier” that amplifies human capability rather than replacing it. For leaders and investors alike, this conversation offers a pragmatic roadmap for navigating the shift from simple compliance to engineering-led defense, arguing that true resilience is about how effectively you recover from friction, not just how well you block it.

Beyond strategy, David offers refreshing career advice for the modern market: prioritize portfolios over buzzwords. He argues that demonstrable problem-solving beats certification stacking every time and highlights the unique value of veterans in cyber, whose operational discipline is often the missing link in incident response. If you are looking to understand the future of security leadership, or hiring the people who will build it, this episode is a masterclass in separating signal from noise.

YouTube Interview

In November, Zscaler announced its intent to acquire SPLX, one of Rain’s portfolio companies, a fast-growing AI security startup. SPLX focused on AI red-teaming initially, but later expanded to protect AI apps across the lifecycle. SPLX’s platform addresses issues like application vulnerabilities, mis-alignment, prompt injection, and agentic governance.

Dr. Wang with the SPLX founders, Kris Kamber and Ante Gojsalic at Blackhat’ 25

Chenxi discovered the young Croatian company earlier in the year and was impressed with their technology. Since our investment, the company has quickly grown, achieving 500% QoQ growth and getting attention from many Fortune 500 customers.

This acquisition helps to strengthen Zscaler’s position in AI-native security by integrating SPLX’s capabilities into its Zero Trust Exchange. It reflects growing enterprise demand for visibility and control over AI assets, and validates SPLX’s early leadership in this critical space.

Acquisition Announcement

Clover Secures $36M to Redefine AI-Driven Product Security

Also in November, Clover Security , another one of Rain’s portfolio companies, announced that it has raised $36 million in funding to accelerate its mission to deliver AI-native product security.

The new funding round was led by Notable Capital, with participation from Wiz co‑founders Assaf Rappaport and Yinon Costica, alongside executives from CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, Atlassian, Google, Snyk, and Cato Networks. Rain Capital is one of the seed investors in the company. This strong roster of backers underscores confidence in Clover’s differentiated approach to product security — Product Security starts with Design, and Clover secures Designs.

Clover Security cofounders Or Chen (CPO) and Alon Kollman (CEO)

This round highlights the growing momentum behind security‑native operations. Rather than focusing solely on augmenting operations, Clover is building tools that integrate security into the very fabric of product engineering. This approach aligns with market demand for trusted products and lifecycle security, offering a potential competitive edge as enterprises and governments seek solutions that combine speed, resilience, and compliance.

Clover's Funding Announcement

Elisity Honored As Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500

Elisity, an intelligent micro-segmentation company, achieved an extraordinary 8,860% revenue growth from 2021 to 2024, earning its place as the #13 fastest‑growing company in North America on Deloitte’s 2025 Technology Fast 500.

This recognition underscores the strong market need for microsegmentation as a core Zero Trust architecture component, positioning Elisity as one of the fastest‑growing Cybersecurity firms in North America.

Elisity’s CEO, James Winebrenner, accepting the Deloitte Award

Elisity’s rise reflects a broader industry shift — enterprises are moving beyond legacy traditional NAC and perimeter‑based defenses toward dynamic infrastructure capable of stopping lateral movements in real time. By continuously mapping least‑privilege policies to users, devices, and workloads, Elisity enables organizations to adopt Zero Trust without costly re‑architecting or operational disruption.

Rain Capital congratulates Elisity for this prominent recognition. We look to great things to come in the future.

Deloitte Fast 500

Dr. Wang Speaking At GCC Conferences

Dr. Wang recently spoke at Saudi Central Bank’s Innovation Summit and Black Hat Middle East & Africa, where she shared insights on AI and quantum computing risks. Her talks highlighted how rapidly evolving innovations in AI and quantum will reshape cryptography, identity, and systemic resilience, and why preparing for quantum-scale threat models must begin now.

With perspectives drawn from her deep technical work and venture experience across various industries, Dr. Wang engaged global leaders at these forums on what the next decade of cyber risk will demand.

Dr. Wang on the stage of Blackhat (L) and with the Vice Governor of Saudi Central Bank (R)

Black MEA Agenda

Astrix and Straiker Honored in Fortune’s Cyber60 list

We’re thrilled to share that two Rain Capital portfolio companies — Astrix Security and Straiker AI — have been named to Fortune’s Cyber60, a recognition reserved for the most innovative and impactful cybersecurity companies.

From securing machine-to-machine identities to building the next generation of AI defense, both companies exemplify the kind of deep technical excellence, category creation, and execution velocity we champion at Rain Capital. Their inclusion in Cyber60 reflects not only breakthrough products, but a relentless pursuit of solving some of the hardest problems in cyber.

Astrix Security is redefining Non-Human and Agentic Identity governance, offering granular visibility and control to mitigate service identity risks that often bypass traditional security perimeters. As organizations increasingly rely on interconnected cloud services, Astrix’s ability to detect shadow integrations and enforce least privilege policies is becoming mission-critical.

Straiker AI, meanwhile, is making waves in the realm of AI-driven testing and protection. Their platform secures agentic AI applications. Purpose-built for chatbots and multi-agent apps, it deploys autonomous defenses that work at agent speed. Straiker arms security teams with two essentials: continuous insight into how live agents behave under pressure and real-time guardrails that keep every agentic decision and tool call on track.

We congratulate Astrix and Straiker for this recognition. Both companies exemplify the kind of innovation that defines this year’s Cyber60 cohort: deeply technical, operationally relevant, and built for resilience.

Cyber60 Leaders

Rain Capital’s portico, Fleak.ai, announced its joining Databricks’ inaugural AI Accelerator cohort, in addition to closing an oversubscribed $5M seed round. This marks a notable milestone for the young company. As one of the five startups chosen from a highly competitive process, Fleak will receive financial backing from Databricks, as well as tailored mentorship and resources to help the company scale.

Fleak is building an AI-powered universal translator that ingests and maps machine data, in real time, into lakehouse environments. Its acceptance into Databrick’s accelerator signals strong technical validation and early traction in data-intensive verticals, including Cybersecurity, High tech, and finance.

Applied to security data, Fleak’s data normalization engine dramatically reduces integration overhead across fragmented security tools, enabling faster incident response and more reliable telemetry. Its lakehouse-native architecture aligns well with modern SOC and AI-driven threat modeling.

Beyond the technical help and guidance, Databrick’s accelerator program also promises access to a powerful ecosystem of investors and partners who helped to shape the AI landscape, including Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Insight Partners,

Congratulations, Fleak! Rain is proud to be one of your first institutional investors. We can’t wait to see what is in store for you!

Databricks AI Accelerator Program

Rain Capital at SINET NYC 2025

The SINET New York 2025 conference is a premier event for cybersecurity professionals and investors seeking a front-row seat to the future of cyber innovation. With its sharp focus on bridging the gap between emerging security startups and enterprise buyers, SINET convenes top CISOs, VCs, and government leaders to surface actionable insights on market trends, AI-native defense, and resilience strategy.

This year’s agenda highlights the convergence of AI and national security, offering rare visibility into how Fortune 500s and federal agencies are adapting to AI-native security operations, accelerated supply chain threats, and quantum-era risks.

Dr. Wang led a panel discussion at SINET on the future of the security organization, with representations from the public sector (CISO of the New York City, Kelly Maon), telecom (CISO of Verizon, financial services), energy tech (CISO for Kraken, Alex Shulman), insurance (Indy Dhiman from Humana), and financial services (Blackstone’s Amy Batallones).

At SINET, two of Rain’s portfolio companies, Elisity and Seemplicity, were named winners of the prestigious SINET16 Innovation Award. Every year, SINET16 recognizes the most innovative and compelling cybersecurity startups worldwide, selected from hundreds of applicants by a panel of industry leaders and CISOs. Elisity’s breakthrough in identity-driven micro-segmentation and Seemplicity’s automation platform for security operations stood out for their transformative impact on enterprise resilience and risk reduction.

SINET 16 Award Announcement

SPLX AI Is Having A Hot, Hot, Hot Year

Since SPLX became the first team in the world to break the freshly released GPT 5.0, the SPLX team has been unstoppable. The young company from Croatia just announced its biggest quarter in history — business grew 520% since last quarter 🔥. That is not all: the company also

💎 added 10 new Fortune 500 logos
💎 delivered 100% PoC conversion rate
💎 rolled out three Major features
💎 grew the team to 30 FTEs

SPLX AI delivers continuous AI red teaming capabilities to enterprises. The demand for its product has grown tremendously as enterprises continue to adopt AI applications.

SPLX is part of the OWASP GenAI Project and has contributed its Agentic Radar as part of the open source project.

Congratulations to the entire SPLX team for continuing to beat expectations!

Learn more about SPLX

Dr. Wang At the Inaugural AI Security Summit

On October 22nd, Dr. Wang spoke at the Inaugural AI Security Summit in San Francisco, hosted by AI Engineers and Snyk. Dr. Chenxi Wang joined an investor panel with Ed Sim (Boldstart), Tahar Elgamal (Evolution), and Guru Chahal (Lightspeed), moderated by Manoj Nair, Chief Product Officer of Snyk.

The panel discussed the intersection of AI innovation and cybersecurity governance, focusing on how security leaders can proactively shape policy and risk frameworks for emerging AI systems.

What are the biggest takeaways from the panel?

• AI is an unprecedented opportunity for innovation and venture.

• AI Security should eventually be absorbed into a larger security platform for enterprise. AI security will equate security in the future.

• But before we get there, innovations will be piece-meal and systems will become more complex. Translation: Enterprise security will be worse before it gets better.

AI Security Summit Short Video

Rain Recommends: Schmidt on AI

Eric Schmidt said the U.S. risks falling behind China in AI deployment, especially in defense and infrastructure.

In an “All In” podcast, Eric Schmidt delivered a strategic briefing on the dual-edged nature of AI, urging cybersecurity investors to prepare for both exponential innovation and geopolitical disruption.

Schmidt warns that the U.S. must accelerate public-private collaboration and regulatory clarity in order to maintain the global leadership position in AI. He highlights the rise of autonomous systems, drone warfare, and synthetic media as areas where AI could reshape threat landscapes, while also pointing to opportunities in secure cloud infrastructure, agentic AI oversight, and national resilience. For investors, Schmidt’s message is clear: AI is not just a tech shift—it’s an imperative, and the winners will be those who fund scalable, sovereign, and safety-first platforms.

YouTube Interview

Checkpoint announced its acquisition of Lakera, a Swiss-based AI security startup, to deliver comprehensive protection across the AI lifecycle from development to deployment. Lakera’s platform is designed to safeguard AI models against emerging threats like prompt injection, data poisoning, and model exfiltration, making it a strategic addition to Checkpoint’s broader vision of end-to-end enterprise security.

This move reflects the growing demand for robust AI security solutions as organizations accelerate adoption of generative and predictive AI technologies.

Rain Capital is thrilled to be an early investor in Lakera and saw its journey from the game of Gandalf to a robust AI security platform.

For many CISOs, this acquisition signals a shift toward integrating AI-specific defenses into traditional security stacks, addressing risks that legacy tools often overlook. As AI becomes central to enterprise computing, the urgency and opportunity of building trust and resilience into the next generation of enterprise AI is paramount.

Congratulations to David Haber, Mateo Rohas-Carulla, and the rest of the Lakera team!

Lakera Acquistion

AI-Powered Successor to Cobalt Strike Raises Alarm

🧠 A newly discovered offensive AI tool automates exploit generation and lowers the barrier to entry for attackers

Straiker, one of Rain’s portfolio companies, has uncovered a powerful new AI-driven penetration testing tool called Villager, described as the “Cobalt Strike successor,” which has already been downloaded nearly 11,000 times. Developed by a China-based entity, Cyberspike, Villager integrates a suite of tools including Kali Linux, DeepSeek model, and a database of over 4,000 AI prompts to automate exploit generation and attack workflows. Its ease of use and automation capabilities make it accessible to attackers with minimal technical expertise, raising serious concerns about its potential for widespread abuse.

Straiker’s security researchers, Dan Regalado and Amanda Rousseau, uncovered Villager on Python Package Index. They discovered that Cyberspike repackaged established hacktools into a turnkey framework designed for penetration testing and probably malicious operations.”

Straiker is an innovative AI security platform that operates by detecting malicious prompt behavior and unauthorized model interactions in real time. Its deep visibility into AI workflows and ability to enforce trust boundaries across model inputs and outputs make it an essential layer of defense in today’s evolving threat landscape.

Straiker Uncovers Villager

Dr. Wang To Speak At TechCrunch Disrupt

On October 29, Dr. Chenxi Wang will take the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 in San Francisco on the panel: “Being Heard in the Age of AI”

In a world where AI systems increasingly filter, generate, and amplify information, how do people, companies, and even entire industries ensure their voices are heard? This panel brings together leaders in AI, cybersecurity, and venture to explore what it means to stand out in a landscape dominated by algorithms and automation. From trust and authenticity to brand differentiation and governance, this panel will discuss the new rules of influence, the risks of being misrepresented by machines, and the strategies innovators are using to shape their narratives in the age of AI.

Check out the techCrunch Disrupt Agenda.

TechCrunch Disrupt Registration

Madrona 2025 CIO Summit: Driving the Future of Secure Cloud Innovation

David Cross will share insights on aligning trust, resilience, and innovation in cloud-native enterprises.

On Wednesday, October 22nd, David Cross will be speaking at the Madrona 2025 CIO Summit, a premier gathering of technology leaders and innovators. His session will focus on the evolving role of security leadership in modern enterprises, offering insights into how CISOs can align trust, resilience, and innovation in increasingly distributed environments. With deep experience in enterprise security and cloud transformation, David brings a strategic perspective that’s highly relevant to today’s CIOs and CISOs navigating complex digital landscapes.

For CIOs and members of the cybersecurity community, David’s talk will highlight the growing convergence between executive leadership and security innovation. As enterprises prioritize secure cloud migration and AI adoption, the summit provides a valuable lens into the technologies and partnerships shaping the next wave of enterprise infrastructure. Attendees can expect actionable takeaways on building scalable, secure systems and identifying startups that are solving tomorrow’s security challenges today.

Madrona CIO Summit Registration

CISO Series Podcast Unpacks Vendor Outreach Failures

David Cross joins hosts David Spark and Mike Johnson to explore how CISOs can foster trust, composure, and meaningful engagement in a noisy cybersecurity landscape.

In the latest episode of the CISO Series Podcast, titled “No Email Has Ever Found You Well,” the speakers dive into the broken dynamics of vendor outreach in cybersecurity. CISOs are inundated with generic, impersonal emails that fail to reflect their actual needs or environments highlighting a systemic issue in how vendors approach engagement. The discussion emphasizes the importance of personalization, warm introductions, and understanding the real decision-makers within security organizations, rather than defaulting to volume-based tactics.

For many CISOs, the episode offers a candid look at how trust and relevance must be rebuilt in the vendor-CISO relationship. It also explores how emotional intelligence and composure especially during high-pressure incidents are becoming essential leadership traits. With insights on tabletop exercises, veteran hiring, and strategic humor, the conversation provides practical guidance for building resilient teams and fostering meaningful industry connections.

CISO Series Podcast

🚨 Seemplicity Raises $50M Series B to Accelerate Risk Reduction in a Booming Cyber Market

Rain Capital Portfolio Company, Seemplicity, has secured a $50 million Series B round to scale its platform that unifies and automates security remediation workflows—an increasingly critical capability as global cybersecurity spending is projected to surpass $215 billion by 2026.

For CISOs, this marks a strategic opportunity to reduce operational drag and accelerate time-to-risk-reduction across fragmented security stacks. For broader startups community, Seemplicity is riding the wave of a fast-growing “Security Productivity” category, offering a compelling value proposition to improve efficiency and create measurable outcomes. As security teams face mounting pressure to do more with less, Seemplicity’s momentum signals a shift toward platforms that turn security intent into action—at scale.

Congratulations to CEO Yoran Sirkis, CPO Ravid Circus, CTO Rotem Gadol, and the entire Seemplicity team!

Seemplicity Announcement

SPLX foils OpenAI’s GPT-5 rollout

🧠 OpenAI’s GPT-5 Rollout Stumbles—Portico SPLX Among First to Expose Cracks in AI’s Armor

Earlier in August, OpenAI’s GPT-5 launch faced immediate issues, prompting the company to partially roll back its launch and reintroduce older models into ChatGPT.

Rain Capital’s portfolio company, SPLX, was one of two companies that broke GPT-5 within the first 24 hours—exposing critical vulnerabilities in the new model. Their work directly led to Altman’s decision to roll back the problematic launch.

For CISOs and AI security leaders, this incident is a stark reminder that frontier models can falter under real-world pressure. As AI adoption accelerates, security, resilience, and transparency must be treated as core tenants of enterprise AI governance.

SPLX offers a purpose-built solution to test and red team AI applications. So far, they have been used to test AI models, applications, and agents for many notable brands and organizations.

SPLX’s hacking GPT-5 work was discussed by VentureBeat, Hacker News, Security Boulevard, and Security Weekly

SPLX Breaks GPT-5 Launch

VC Office Hours With Dr. Wang At The SF Tech Weekend

📣 Dr. Wang will be holding VC Office Hours on September 5th, for the upcoming SF Tech Weekend

Founders—don’t miss your chance to connect with one of the industry’s most respected voices. Dr. Chenxi Wang, Founder of Rain Capital and a leading cybersecurity VC, will be hosting office hours on September 5th from 10 AM to 12 PM during San Francisco Tech Weekend.

Whether you're a founder seeking strategic guidance or a security expert exploring the VC landscape, this is a rare opportunity to gain insights from a top-tier investor shaping the future of cyber and AI. Still time to reserve a spot!

Tech Weekend Registration

Cyber Confidential Podcast

Cyber Confidential Episode 3: Should CISOs Care About Startups?

This episode explored the relationship between cybersecurity leadership and the startup ecosystems. Hosted by Joe Sullivan, former CSO of Facebook and Uber, Vitaly Gudanets, former CISO of Netflix, and Dr. Wang, the episode dives into why Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) should pay attention to emergent technology — not just for threat intelligence, but also for strategic insights, talent acquisition, and competitive advantages.

Sullivan discusses how startups often pioneer cutting-edge solutions that can help CISOs stay ahead of adversaries, and how engaging with them can foster agility and innovation within larger organizations. The three also discussed the right model of CISO-founder collaboration — how to handle conflict of interest and create win-win outcomes.

This episode offers a candid, insider perspective on how startups can engage with CISOs; the risks and rewards of collaborating with early stage companies.

It's a must-watch for security leaders looking to stay competitive and informed in a fast-moving digital world. It’s also packed with real insights for founders who want to establish productive relationships with security leaders.

Cyber Confidential Podcast

A few weeks ago, Dr. Wang attended the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. An annual gathering of global leaders from business, politics, academia, and civil society, the WEF forum is known for setting the global agenda on economic and social issues. This year, WEF 2025 brought engaging panels, debates, and sessions on Artificial Intelligence, the shifting political landscape, Cybersecurity, sustainable humanity, and international collaborations.

Dr. Wang participated in two panels with the Cyber Future Forum, where Cybersecurity leaders around the world discussed global cyber threats, regulatory outlooks, the evolving role of the Cybersecurity leadership, and the intersection of AI & security.

Dr. Wang provided an overview of her freshman experience at Davos in a LinkedIn video. To summarize, Davos discussions focused on these aspects:

• Global economic outlook: There are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the global economic growth. Inflation seems to be in check, and fundamentals of the global economy are strong. Many believe 2025 will see steady economic recoveries around the world.

• Trump 2.0 & the shifting political landscape: Trump’s second administration is expected to be business friendly and light on regulations. While many are skeptical of the stability of Trump’s strategies, business leaders remain optimistic that US will launch into a rapid recovery phase to foster business growth.

• Regulatory outlook: Trump’s administration is actively pursuing a deregulation agenda, aiming to reduce federal oversight and promote business interests. While these changes are welcomed by some business sectors, they have also ignited discussions about the potential risks and long-term impacts associated with reduced regulatory frameworks.

View Dr. Wang's Davos video

Deepseek & Project Discovery v1 Launch

Earlier in January, Deepseek, an AI model from China, was all the rage. Gal Nagli, a security researcher, was one of the first to discover the model’s security vulnerabilities that exposed over 1 million DeepSeek records including private user data and API keys. Nagli famously used several ProjectDiscovery's tools -- Nuclei subfinder, and httpx -- for this work.

ProjectDiscovery’s tools have long been the favorite for red teams. This was yet another validation. The team over at ProjectDiscovery leveraged this incredible momentum and launched Project Discovery V1, which brought forth several significant advancements in vulnerability detection and management. With this launch, ProjectDiscovery is making vulnerability management more proactive, scalable, and aligned with the needs of modern tech stacks.

The V1 launch included:

1. Enhanced Vulnerability Detection: The platform now includes advanced workflows and AI-powered tools to improve the accuracy and speed of vulnerability detection[1].

2. Expanded Discovery Capabilities: New tools like tlsx, uncover, and asnmap have been added to enhance asset discovery and monitoring[2].

3. AI-Powered Asset Contextualization: The platform uses AI to generate custom labels and bulk tagging, making it easier to manage and categorize assets[2].

4. Improved Scanning Architecture: The scanning architecture has been redesigned for unprecedented speed and scale, making it more efficient for modern security workflows[1].

5. Enterprise Features: New enterprise features have been introduced to empower large security teams with advanced controls and operational capabilities[1].

Try Project Discovery

Claroty Leading Gartner’s CPS Protection MQ

Claroty was recently named a Leader in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) Protection Platforms and ranked as the highest for both the Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.

Claroty's platform offers extensive asset visibility, exposure management, network protection, secure access, and threat detection, supporting both cloud and on-premise deployments and it stood out from the 17 other evaluated vendors!

The recognition follows significant achievements for Claroty, including surpassing $100 million in ARR, achieving over 300% growth since 2020, and counting 20% of the Fortune 100 as customers. The company also recently announced a multi-year strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to boost its go-to-market distribution. As an early investor in the company, Rain Capital is proud to have witnessed the creation of the CPS protection category, the growth of the business ,as well as the many industry accolades that Claroty has received.

Gartner CPS Protection MQ

CruiseCon 2025 Insights

David Cross recently joined fellow CISOs and cybersecurity leaders at the inaugural CruiseCon event. CruiseCon was a unique cybersecurity conference held aboard a cruise ship with keynote sessions from Admiral Michael S. Rogers, high profile industry CISOs, as well as extensive networking opportunities. Topics covered included international Cyber regulations, AI and privacy, and best practices for cybersecurity compliance.

As a speaker and panelist, David summarized his experience from the inaugural Cruisecon:

• The evolving CISO role: The CISO role is no longer a single, static role. Today’s CISO handles a set of broad responsibilities and commitment across diverse teams, functional roles, and customer-facing responsibilities..

• Human Risk Management: Companies are struggling with malicious insiders and the lack of human-centric controls. Human risk managements is becoming increasingly more important. Attendees at Cruisecon shared best practices around managing human-based risks. Living Security was mentioned as a pioneer in this area.

• AI’s attack surface: Digital transformation with AI is here to stay. The attack surface for AI is broad and a concern for many. Cruisecon saw extensive discussions on AI governance: the fact that there are 215+ global policies governing AI makes it challenging for most security teams. The new FTC regulation on deep fake protection was also discussed.

• Salt Typhoon group: Many cited the the continuing threat that Salt Typhoon group poses to smaller organizations and systems that do not have the resources and expertise to defend against such attacks. It is estimated that there are 31 billion assets in the US are unpatched and vulnerable.

Cyber Confidential Podcast

Dr. Chenxi Wang introduced a new podcast, Cyber Confidential with Joe Sullivan, Jim Higgins, and Vitaly Gudanets. The podcast will focus on the evolving role of the security leadership, the threat landscape, and the innovation trends in the Cyber market.

The first episode talked about the evolving role of the CISO.

The second episode focused on the new administration’s impact on the Cybersecurity industry.

Insights from notable leaders like Sullivan, Higgins, and Gudanets can shape the popular narrative that defines the role of the cybersecurity leadership. This podcast aims to amplify the conversation around Cybersecurity leadership in a complex geopolitical and technical landscape. The discussions represent authentic experiences from the human behind the “CISO”, with real stories from the trenches.

Cyber Confidential Podcast

Tuskira’s Agentic AI Security Mesh changes this dynamic by integrating data from over 150 data sources to create a unified, preemptive defense strategy. Unlike traditional aggregation technology, Tuskira validates exploitability in real time, simulates attack pathways, and automates security control assessments and mitigation to continuously strengthen defenses against evolving threats.

Tuskira is not just another player in the growing field of AI cybersecurity, it’s one of the first platforms to truly operationalize AI for cyber defense at scale. Where others focus on detection alone, Tuskira delivers real-time validation of exploitable threats, determines real risk levels from context, and executes proactive mitigation. Its patented AI-driven exposure management technology ensures that defenses are unified and continuously optimized, turning reactive strategies into synchronized, preemptive operations.

In addition, Tuskira is not just a thin wrapper on a third-party LLM like many of the AI-enabled applications out there today. Rather, the team is developing its own AI infra backend and data advantages. We are incredibly excited about the potential of the technology and its impact on Cybersecurity.

Portfolio Announcement

Astrix Series B

Astrix Security, another one of Rain’s seed investments, just completed a massive $45M series B to redefine non-human identity. Rain Capital is proud to be an early investor in the company.

Astrix Security is pioneering technology to secure non-human identities (NHIs) such as API keys, service accounts, and secrets. This is crucial as the use of NHIs has exploded in modern infrastructure such as cloud and micro-services. With the proliferation of AI agents, NHIs are becoming even more pervasive. With Gartner predicting that at least 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through AI by 2028, securing NHIs is becoming increasingly important.

Series B Details

Berkley AI Agent MOOC

Berkey’s Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence is hosting an LLM Agents MOOC Hackathon, led by Professor Dawn Song. Along with Chi Wang, Xinyun Chen, Elie Bursztein, Daniel Miessler, Anand Raghavan, Rajko Radovanović and many others, Dr. Chenxi Wang will serve as a judge for the hackathon.

Over 2100 innovators already signed up to participate in the hackathon, which will complete in January 2025. The hackathon will ask participants to build LLM agents across 5 tracks - Applications, Benchmarks, Fundamentals, Safety, and Decentralized & Multi-Agents.

$200K+ in prizes/resources from OpenAI Google AMD Lambda Intel Corporation Sierra Orby AI ServiceNow Schmidt Sciences and more will be awarded to the winning teams.

Join the Hackathon

LA CISO Community

Dr. Chenxi Wang and Snap’s Nick Reva recently hosted an oversold CISO dinner in the LA area which bring practitioners and thought leaders together to discuss vulnerability-management, security automations, and innovations that empower security operations.

The dinner was generously sponsored by Simbian and Seemplicity, both offer innovative solutions to help organizations identify, prioritize, streamline and automate different aspects of SecOps across security and IT.

Snap’s Nick Reva moderated the dinner discussion, which saw an engaged and open discussion spanning SecOps challenges, SaaS vulnerabilities, AI do’s and don’ts, and everyone’s favorite — predictions for 2025.

Interest in Rain’s CISO events? Subscribe to our news letter.

Subscribe now

Podcast: Investing in Early-Stage Cybersecurity and Enterprise Software Startups

In this episode of the Innovators and Investors Podcast, host Kristian Marquez interviews David Cross, venture partner at Rain Capital. David discusses his journey into venture capital, the importance of cybersecurity, the influence of AI on the industry, and key factors in evaluating startups. David emphasizes the need for passion in founders, the significance of market understanding, and the importance of being adaptable to changes in the market landscape.

Investing in Early Stage Cybersecurity

Hot off the press: Congratulations to Rain Capital’s portfolio company, Living Security, who was just named a leader in the The Forrester Wave Report: Human Risk Management Solutions, published on September 19th, 2024.

See that small but mighty dot on the upper-right corner of the Wave graph below? That is Living Security, leader and innovator in the Human Risk Management market.

The Forrester Wave: Human Risk Management Solutions

What is Human Risk Management? It is applying risk management approaches to proactively identify, assess, and mitigate human behavior-related Cybersecurity risks. Living Security’s Unify platform empowers organizations to manage human risks and protect their security postures. According to Forrester, Living Security is the clear winner in both strategy as well as the current product capabilities.

Living Security’s Unify product is the go-to partner technology for many enterprises, including Mastercard, MassMutual, Uber, Merck, and many others, in their quest to manage human risks and protect their security postures.

Forrester Wave Report

Cyber Confidential Podcast

This month, Dr. Chenxi Wang, along with Joe Sullivan, former CISO of Cloudflare, Meta, and Uber, Jim Higgins, CISO of Snap Inc., and Vitaly Gudanets, CISO of Netflix, launched a new podcast titled "Cyber Confidential".

Sullivan, Higgins, and Gudanets are industry veterans with many years of experience working in the trenches, defending enterprise operations and protecting users’ data and information. The four leaders want a place where they can provide an unfiltered look behind the job of the Chief Information Security Officer, discuss today's challenges, unpack technology trends, and dispel industry myths.

Joe, Jim, Vitaly, and Chenxi are on a quest to reshape the popular narrative that defines cybersecurity leadership. This podcast will amplify the discussion about challenges faced by the “CISO”, especially in a complex geopolitical and technical landscape. These are authentic experiences from the human behind the title and real stories from the trenches.

Subscribe to the Cyber Confidential YouTube channel and the introductory videos.

Subscribe to the Podcast

OX Security Recognized for Fast Momentum in AppSec

This month, Frost & Sullivan recognized OX Security, an Application Security Posture Management Platform company, as one of the company with the fastest-growing momentum in the ASPM market.

The FROST Radar report highlights OX Security’s rapid growth, innovative technology, and leadership in managing the increasing complexities of application security. The major highlights from the report include:

💠 Innovation – The OX Security ASPM Platform simplifies AppSec initiatives and alleviates the complexity of securing modern software development across multiple tech stacks and diverse environments
💠 Comprehensive coverage: OX’s ASPM solution offers coverage not only for code but also APIs, containers, and cloud, supporting rich contextual analysis and triage

💠 Peer Insights – Consistent praise from OX’s customers about the product solving their toughest security challenges
💠Rapid growth – OX achieved triple digital growth from last year and counts some of the biggest names and most forward-looking enterprises in the industry as customers and partners

Frost Radar ASPM Report

Speaking Appearances

This month you will find Dr. Wang keynoting the Stanford Cybersecurity day and speaking at GITEX in Dubai. Popular topics include AI & Security, and AI risks in enterprise.

This year, BSides San Francisco welcomed its largest ever audience — with 2800 attendees, the event is rapidly becoming a must-attend for technical cyber professionals. Dr. Chenxi Wang kicked off the event as the opening keynote with her talk: “Navigating the AI Frontier: Investing in AI in the Evolving Cyber Landscape”.

She highlighted several key points:

1. AI will forever transform software development practices — Software engineering is becoming Model Engineering, and its impact on Cybersecurity is transformative.

2. AI for security has tremendous potential, such as accelerating threat detection, continuous compliance, and more accurate code analysis.

3. About half of the security market spend is on manual professional services, which AI is poised to disrupt. AI-enabled services is

BSides Keynote Video

Fortune 60 Winners

Congratulations to three of Rain Capital's portfolio companies Claroty, JupiterOne, runZero for being recognized in the Fortune Cyber 60 List!

It is not easy to build a startup that stands out amongst the noise in the market. Fortune Cyber60 recognizes those that have built a unique and differentiated business -- Claroty for innovating and continuing to lead in the OT/IOT security space. JupiterOne for creating the CAASM category and runZero for innovating in device and network visibility.

Claroty was recognized in the Growth-stage category. JupiterOne and runZero in Early-growth-stage category. Kudos to all the founders and operators for innovating and delivering every day!

Fortune Cyber 60

The GenAI Evolution

Speaking of AI, Rain Capital has had many discussions with business and technology leaders on the evolution of GenAI in the enterprise. Dr. Wang created a slide deck to capture the essence of these conversations.

First Generation: Users with SaaS LLMs. In this generation, LLMs are typically third party LLMs. Security consideration remain mostly governance.

Second Gen: Users, LLMs, and RAG. In this generation, Retrieval Augmented Generation is used to add enterprise data to LLM computing. Security considerations are governance + data access management. The LLMs here are still predominately third party ones, although orgs begin to serve customers in this model.

Third Gen: Agentic AI, A network of agents, with tools and LLMs. Security considerations for this are many faceted, including governance, model security, data security, inter-agent communication security, etc. Here you may have your own LLMs or use third party ones. But you will probably develop your own agents.

The slide deck is accessible below. We welcome feedback and comments!

GenAI: Evolution Slides

The Selfie that broke LinkedIn, 100,000 views and counting …

At RSA, Dr. Chenxi Wang took a selfie with Brad Arkin, CISO of Salesforce, Kirsten Davies, CISO of Unilever, Christophe Biasse, CISO of Schneider Electric, Ariel Litkin, CISO of First Quqlity Enterprise, Tim Brown, CISO of Solarwinds, and Gary Hayslip, CISO of Softbank Investments.

The photo and its post have been viewed over 100,000 times on LinkedIn in the first two weeks and the stats are still growing. Cybersecurity is a close-knit community. Rain Capital is delighted to work with so many of our industry colleagues who helped us shape our vision of fund investments.

Latest Podcast Recommendation

As a continuing insights newsletter feature, we would like to recommend an episode of the Inside the Network podcast that highlights Doug Merritt, former CEO of Splunk, and his journey about building Splunk into a “Decacorn” ($10Bn company).

In this episode, Doug talked about building and scaling teams and companies, disrupting categories and more. Most importantly, he talked about “The premium is in the grind” — What differentiates an entrepreneur is your ability to grind through all the unsexy activities to make your company a reality.

Give it a listen, we found Doug’s insight illuminating.

Inside the Network podcast episode

As per usual, Rain Capital will have a significant presence at the RSA conference. Here are some of the highlights:

• Dr. Chenxi Wang is the opening keynote for the BSides SF conference on Saturday May 4th, right before RSA. For 15 years, BSides events offer a community-driven, grass-root alternative to the traditional, larger security conferences. BSides SF will feature a diverse range of technical talks, workshops, and networking opportunities. Dr. Wang will speak about AI innovation opportunities in cybersecurity.

• On the first day of RSA, Dr. Chenxi Wang is on the opening panel of the conference: “The State of Venture Capital in Cybersecurity ”. Last year at RSA, this panel opened the conference to a standing-room only audience. All the panelists are back for a repeat appearance this year. Dr. Wang will be bantering with Dave DeWalt from Nightdragon, Mark Hatfiled from Ten Eleven Ventures, Yoav Letitersdorf from YL Ventures, and Nadav Zafrir from Team8, at 8:30am on May 6th, at Moscone South - RSAC Sandbox Theater - 208.

  

• Right after the opening panel, David B. Cross will be speaking on the “CISOs under indictment” panel at 9:40am on Monday May 6th, with Joe Sullivan (former CISO of Uber), Charles Blauner (former Citigroup CISO), and Gadi Evron (former Team8 CISO in residence). The panel will debate the evolving CISO role, personal risks to CISOs, and shifts in the industry and the regulatory landscape. This session will happen at 9:40am, May 6th, at Moscone West - 2001.

  Agenda At RSA

Simbian Emerges from Stealth

Our latest investment, Simbian, announced its launch on April 11, 2024. Simbian focuses on revolutionizing cybersecurity through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by providing fully autonomous security solutions for cyber defense.

The Simbian team brings together decades of Cybersecurity and AI experiences to create tailored autonomous task execution and workflows to empower security teams.

Simbian’s flagship product is the TrustedLLM™ system, which is designed to accelerate security. Their system empowers every member of a security team, from C-Suite executives to frontline practitioners. It allows them to craft customized insights and workflows, covering a wide range of security tasks such as complex investigations, incident response, governance, and reporting.

Simbian AI Innovation

Claroty Eyeing A Possible 2025 IPO

One of Rain Capital’s portfolio companies, Claroty, is rumored to be eyeing a 2025 IPO, following a recent $100M late-stage capital raise that put the company at $2.5 billion valuation.

Claroty operates in the field of cyber protection for cyber-physical enterprises and critical infrastructures. Their customers include who-is-who in manufacturing, oil & gas, healthcare, and high tech. The company crossed an impressive $100M ARR and its customer count has grown 300% in the last year. If Claroty maintains its current growth rate, it could reach IPO-level milestones in 2025.

Even though the company has not determined a specific timeline toward IPO, it is exciting to see Claroty’s continued growth and expansion in the market. At RSA, Claroty will be running The Claroty Beats Hub on Wednesday May 7th, at the B Restaurant located at 720 Howard St, San Francisco (Directly across and above the Moscone Center in Yerba Buena Gardens, connected by a skybridge)

See Claroty at RSA

How Women Lead with AI

Dr. Chenxi Wang recently spoke on a How Women Lead webinar to discuss how AI is impacting everyday lives. The webinar discussed how soon we will move from task specific AI with a limited scope to AI with agency. How do people prepare? How are the most creative and cutting edge founders and investors harnessing this potential?

The conversation centered around an innovation, business-building perspective, but it also touched upon how individuals can prepare for the groundswell shift brought on by AI and how business leaders can carve their own path to leverage the opportunities.

How Women Lead

Latest Podcast Recommendation

Based on popular response from last month’s kickoff, we have a new recommendation for this edition, and it is very timely with the upcoming RSA conference talks about upcoming risks and threats from China.

Kara Swisher had a great interview with Dimitri Alperovitch, co-founder and former CTO of CrowdStrike and author of the new book World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the 21st Century, and Chris Krebs, Chief Intelligence Officer at SentinelOne and former Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on the upcoming cybersecurity and other threats emerging from China.

Dmitri and Chris discuss a number of the threats, signals and indicators that many organizations must drive to prepare against this potential catastrophic outcome. It is completely aligned with the US Department of Defense's 2023 cybersecurity strategy highlights that China likely intends to launch destructive cyber attacks against the U.S. Homeland during conflict, hindering military mobilization and causing chaos that many organizations need to prepare for and need numerous tools and cyber defenses in advance of November 13, 2028.

On with Kara Swisher Podcast

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The RSA Conference has just announced the top 10 finalist nominations for the RSAC Innovation Sandbox contest. We are happy to share that our portfolio companies, Mitiga, was named one of the top 10 finalist for the Innovation Sandbox! The sandbox contest has been running for almost two decades and it is always a highlight for the annual conference.

Mitiga helps organization build and maintain a Security Data Lake, designed specifically for detection, response, and investigation. Their solutions proactively gather, preprocess, and store relevant cloud and SaaS data. And at the same time, Mitiga’s purpose-built analysis layer on top of the data enables threat hunting, detection/response, and complex investigation workflows.

Mitiga’s Platform allows security operators to easily investigate malicious activity across cloud and SaaS footprints, with built-in integrations to existing security stacks such as SOC tools and on-premise SIEMs.

A big benefit of Mitiga’s solution is that they can perform Cloud D&R and investigation, and maintain a security datalake at a significantly lower cost of ownership than almost any other solutions out there, including traditional SIEM and general purpose data lakes.

We are excited to see Mitiga on the stage of RSA Innovation Sandbox sharing their story. If you plan to attend RSA, definitely stop by the sandbox event on Monday afternoon to see the exciting competition!

RSA Innovation Sandbox

Inaugural RSA Entrepreneur CISO Breakfast

This year the RSA conference is holding an inaugural entrepreneur and CISO breakfast. Our General Partner, Dr. Chenxi Wang, will serve as one of the breakfast hosts helping RSA curating content and leading discussions.

At the breakfast, participating CISOs will have the opportunity to meet with a curated list of startup companies to discuss a range of innovation topics. One of our portfolio companies, Gutsy, will be featured at the event.

Across almost all organizations, the cybersecurity stacks have reached unmanageable levels of bloat. Gutsy uses process mining to help organizations visualize and analyze their complex security processes to understand how they actually run, based on observable event data. Gutsy is able to identify every tool, step and action required to ensure the right security and compliance postures. Gutsy can find where all actions deviate from industry best practices and policies and label which security tools are not meeting the desired targets.

Learn more about Gutsy

Rethinking Observability

Dr. Chenxi Wang recently published a popular and insightful article on how we all need to rethink observability. Organizations need a way to understand what is happening in highly distributed systems. Today, observability is the approach of choice, and suddenly observability projects are everywhere.

Overall, business and security leaders need to stop thinking basic observability, but instead, shifting their to focus on critical user journeys (CUJ) and mechanisms to deliver and preserve CUJs. A CUJ is a sequence of user interactions vital for the successful operation of a service. It directly affects the user’s satisfaction and engagement with the service. This model is how we all must adapt and change our lens in how software and services are produced going forward.

Rethinking Observability Webinar

Mergers and Acquisitions Have Returned

It is clear that 2024 is the year of M&A. We have already seen three M&As in the first few days of business in the beginning of this calendar year that are forecasting on what we may continue to see over the next 18 months.

The foreshadowing is quite bright that 2024 will be a year of M&A, consolidation and acquisitions for many companies to expand their breadth of their portfolios. Many are predicting the cybersecurity industry to see a lot of consolidation and acquisition activities. As noticed by other VCs, there is significant interest by non-cybersecurity organizations adding cyber capabilities to their portfolio. In addition, some of the larger tech and cybersecurity companies are predicted to acquire smaller SaaS startups. There is also a strong expectation of mergers between passwordless and credential management companies.

Cybersecurity Consolidation

Cyber Resilience

Is 2024 the year of cyber resilience?

The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024 report by the World Economic Forum and Accenture Security predicts that the year 2024 will be marked by a focus on cyber resilience. The report highlights the need for organizations to build resilience and enable systemic global collaboration to tackle the multifaceted challenges facing leaders across the globe. The report also underscores the growing cyber divide and the need to bridge the gaps between the public and private sectors and between cyber and business leaders.

This challenge clearly is an opportunity call for innovation and solutions that are emerging from our rapidly evolving cyber startup community. To combat the next set of threats, crime operators and nation state attackers, modern and new technology is needed to provide the necessary resilience. This is strongly suggested in the report which we believe will drive the next focus areas and interests from CISOs and the broader business community.

Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2024

Podcast Recommendation

Something new this month: a podcast recommendation! The Angel Investors Network has a great set of interviews and podcasts that resonate with many newcomers and experienced hands in the community. In one of the most recent episodes, Zach Oehlman walks listeners/watchers through his career in building a business empire that now allows him to explore the world. He discusses overcoming challenges, the power of an exceptional team, and the realization of ambitious goals.

Angel Investors Network Podcasts

Recently, Dr. Chenxi Wang and David Cross spoke at Blackhat MEA in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. We engaged with startups and businesses in the region, and also networked with security leaders attending the conference from afar.

Attending Blackhat and seeing Saudi Arabia was an amazing experience, both professionally and personally. The picture above was one of the group outings to the “edge of the world”.

The region is craving cybersecurity solutions — the 40,000+ Blackhat attendees and the bustling conference halls tells that story distinctively. The kingdom is going through a transition from a closed-off country to opening up its boarders and welcoming people from around the globe. This has fueled economic growth, created jobs, and fostered business opportunities.

Chenxi Wang and David Cross on stage at Blackhat MEA

It is apparent to us that the broader Middle East/Africa region is hungry for technology innovation and leadership. Modern tech skills including cybersecurity, DevOps, and cloud infrastructure are in demand. The Capture-the-flag session at the conference had easily several hundred participants, many who are women engineers.

We are inspired by what we saw in Riyadh. Amidst a turbulent time in the middle east, the Blackhat conference was a bright spot. For anyone interested in building and expanding services and technology offerings targeting the middle east, NOW is the right time to get into the market.

Blackhat MEA

Is RE:Invent the New Security Conference?

For a long time, the annual RSA Conferences in San Francisco and the Blackhat Conference in Las Vegas were the two primary conferences security leaders gather to discuss the latest threats and technology landscape changes.

That is changing, evidenced by what we saw a few weeks ago at AWS re:Invent.

This year’s re:Invent attracted 65,000 attendees. Nearly all major security vendors exhibited at the conference. The topics on stage spanned GenAI, serverless computing, Cybersecurity, and cloud architecture. Numerous cybersecurity sessions were highlighted and even more discussions happened in the hallways.

We met many security leaders at the conference. Quite a few told us that re:Invent is now the event of the year for them to learn, to grow, and to find valuable collaborations. Same goes for startups; many security founders view re:Invent critical to the success of their companies, as their customers increasingly become a core part of the re:Invent community.

A few talks that we thought were excellent:

• Clark Roger’s “Shipping securely: How strong security can be your strategic advantage”

• David Victoria’s “Shaping the future of security on AWS with generative AI”

• Holly Mesrobian and Grant Lammi’s discussion of “Building for the future with AWS serverless services”

re:Invent Security Topics

Generative AI Security

In our travels this year, Generative AI and Generative AI Security were two of the hottest topics. We have been interviewing practitioners who are using GenAI for real business applications and are impressed with the rapid adoption of GenAI across industries. We saw document processing, customer support, automatic information extraction as the three areas that have the fastest enterprise adoption of GenAI.

But of course we are cybersecurity specialists, so our conversations with technology leaders invariably lead to AI security. We are doing a piece of research on what it mean to secure AI (not AI for security, which is a different topic that we will explore in a future post). Here is a preview — five facets of securing AI — Governance, Model assessment, Responsible AI, Data security & privacy, and Model SecOps.

We are taking input and feedback on these areas as we speak. Send us your comments and thoughts to info@raincapital.vc

Share Rain Capital Insights

But we are touched and inspired by how resilient the human spirit is. Many of our Israeli friends continue to impress us with their determination to innovate and desire for a better future, despite the recent adversities.

Our October newsletter, therefore, is dedicated to the undiminishable human spirit and peace, however fragile that seems.

Gutsy Launches To Bring Process Mining to Cybersecurity

Our newest investment, Gutsy, has launched out of stealth mode with a tremendous $51 million seed raise. This round was led by Mayfield, with participation from YL Ventures, a few super angels, and Rain Capital.

Gutsy was founded by the the team behind the successful container security company, Twistlock. Twistlock led the container security innovation and was acquired by Palo Alto in a supersized exit.

Gutsy is innovating by applying a set of data science techniques called process mining to security analytics. Process mining is a concept populated by the likes of Celonis for business process analysis. This is the first time that someone applied this to cybersecurity processes. We are excited to see how this innovation in security analytics can help organizations understand the maturity of their processes and move to advance, remediate, and measure quickly and effectively.

Learn more about Gutsy

Seemplicity Receives A Gartner “Cool Vendor” Nod

Seemplicity recently received a Gartner #CoolVendor recognition in the Modern Security Operations Center category. The Gartner Cool Vendor award is given out each year to innovative early-stage companies that are making a splash in their respective markets.

As Gartner highlighted in the description about innovative solutions for the Modern Security Operations Center: “These cool vendors focus on innovative ways to support a SOC through the use of automation and innovative approaches”, Seemplicity empowers security teams to accelerate risk reduction by automating the remediation process through seamless integration and workflow management.

Rain Capital congratulates the Seemplicity team for this major accomplishment!

Read the cool vendor report

Mitiga Receives Strategic Investment from Cisco

Mitiga, one of the fast-growing Rain Capital portfolio companies, recently announced a strategic investment from Cisco.

As David Cross called out in his RSA Presentation this year, ALL companies are moving to the cloud…but many do not have the tools, practices and expertise for their security tasks. For example, capturing cloud logs/data and performing high fidelity security analysis remains a difficult proposition for many. Mitiga set out to tackle this very challenge. The company provides a purpose-built, cloud-native platform designed to ingest cloud logs and perform rapid security analytics and investigations.

One of Mitiga’s customers told us that they used to spend two weeks ingesting AWS cloud trail data for security investigation — a task that Mitiga performs in 20 minutes. This is a game changer, especially with the new SEC guidelines that requires companies disclose a cyber incident 4 days after determining materiality.

This is why large companies like Cisco invests in Mitiga to help their customers strengthen cloud security operations. We are thrilled with this partnership and look for great things to come as a result.

Learn more about Mitiga

Upcoming Conferences and Events

BIS Cybersecurity Conference

On November 9th, Dr. Chenxi Wang will be keynoting the cybersecurity conference for the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). This is BIS’ first Cybersecurity conference, with the theme of Cybersecurity for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) conference. It will be an exciting exploration of how we secure the future monetary system and the role of cybersecurity in digital bank currencies.

BlackHat MEA

Both David Cross and Dr. Chenxi Wang are speakers at BlackHat MEA this year in Riyadh. Dr. Wang will be keynoting and also serving on the judging panel of a startup pitch competition. As we all know, the challenges faced by cybersecurity practitioners are universal around the globe. BlackHat MEA is an amazing, dynamic, and energetic environment that promises to engender many fruitful and diverse conversations for the global cyber community.

RAISE Global Summit

The RAISE Global Summit happened on October 26 in San Francisco this year. Over 700 emerging fund managers applied to meet the 200+ LPs and 100 were selected to attend and even fewer were selected to present on stage. Rain’s GP, Dr. Chenxi Wang, was selected to moderate a panel at RAISE Global on Cybersecurity and Defense Tech.

As geopolitical landscapes shift and the global regulatory scenes evolve, cybersecurity and defense companies are becoming an increasingly interesting asset class. The panel discussion also touched on innovations such as cloud and AI, and their impact on the Cybersecurity market.

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I got to know Andy Chou, the founder of Ventrilo, from the days of Coverity. I still remember the first time I met the Coverity team, when they came to brief me and discussed using Boolean Satisfiability for program analysis.

“Satisfiability!” I exclaimed.

I had just left my faculty job at Carnegie Mellon University. Someone talking about NT-completeness in a product was like music to my ears. Andy and his co-founders were from the same tribe as me — we care deeply about technology and the problems that make technology fun.

In the ensuing years, Coverity matured and so did I. I went from a young technologist to a product executive and along the way developed a deep appreciation to what it is like to build a product vs. a piece of technology.

Coverity was a success story. However, it was not without challenges. The founders wrote about their learnings in an article “A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World” in the Communication of ACM.

For example, this was a conversation with a customer prospect:

[Customer]: “How do I run your tool?”

[Coverity]: “Oh, it’s easy. Just type ‘cov-build’ before your build command.”

[Cusotmer]: “Build command? I just push this [GUI] button...”

I literally fell off my chair laughing. This, to me, captures perfectly the gap between what technologists thought the customer wanted and what the customer actually wants. Other learnings include finding the maximum number of errors is not always the best thing; finding errors that people can do something about is far better, etc., etc.

All jokes aside, the “A Few Billion Lines of Code Later” article mirrors many of the learnings that I had as I transitioned from an academic researcher to industry operator and finally to an investor.

I learned that founders who wakes up everyday obsessed with building a product that truly solves customers’ problems are the people that you want to bet on.

So when Andy talked to me about his idea of “Ventrilo” — leveraging AI to model how humans interact with applications and use that for program testing and quality. I got excited not only because the idea is novel, but also I know that Andy will be building this not only for the “coolness” of the tech, but also from the product delivery point of view.

Since I started discussing with Andy, Ventrilo moved quickly; the team grew, more world-class talent joined, many investors came to the table, and soon enough, a $10 million seed round took shape.

Andreeseen’s Martin Casado let the round, with participations from us, super angels Elad Gil and Lachy Groom. Bloomberg Beta and Conviction are also part of the round.

Rain is elated that we are part of Ventrilo’s journey. A few weeks ago, we met the young company, as a whole, in Palo Alto. I walked away from that meeting energized and ready to change the world.

If you are as excited about Ventrilo as I am, they are hiring and you can help spread the word. If you want to push the boundaries of LLM-based systems, browser automation, graph algorithms, and serverless architecture, and have a passion to create groundbreaking solutions for complex problems, send resumes here.

Heading into 2023, one thing is certain - we are going back to basics. Differentiated tech, strong teams, and a reasonable valuation will be how investments are made.

With that in mind, a new article in Fortune recognized Rain Capital as one of the top 13 Cyber investors in the industry.

Amongst the funds recognized in the article, Rain Capital is the only woman-founded fund and one of the few emergent funds that did not come from a long finance background.

Even though the global economy remained volatile, Cybersecurity continues to be a robust sector. Looking back in 2022, the amount of investments in Cyber M&A and financing reached $127 B by the end of Q3 in 2022, compared to $106 B for the entire year of 2021.

Five Year Cyber M&A & Financing Trends in Billions 1

With this outlook and a renewed focus on business fundamentals, the Rain Capital team is pumped for the new year and ready to partner with exceptional teams to build sustainable businesses.

Rain Capital I is four years in the making: 10 investments, 2 unicorns. ~40% women founders, and many robust businesses.

Rain Capital II: Just starting, backing exceptional entrepreneurs.

Fortune Article

CircleCI Incident - Cover All Stages Of Kill Chain

Earlier this month, CircleCI, a widely deployed dev tool platform with over one million users, suffered a security breach. The company published a detailed blog on the incident, describing how their CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) platform was breached and enabled attackers to steal credentials stored in the service to attack their customer’s services/products.

What is interesting about this incident is that, the breach was first discovered by one of CircleCI’s customers via the use of a Canary Token. In this since deleted tweet, security researcher Daniel Huckmann stated that he had been investigating an improperly accessed Canary token over the holidays. Early January, CircleCI confirmed the breach.

Those of us in the industry all know that CircleCI has a fairly robust security practice. But even with that, you may not immediately know that you are breached. This is a perfect example that you need to cover all stages of the Kill Chain - Canary tokens indicate a possible “credential access” event, which comes at one of the later stages in the Kill Chain framework.

Many organizations deploy technology to cover earlier stages of the Kill Chain, but ignore signal detection for the later parts, which has proved to be problematic. Threat hunting, Canary detection, and Red Teaming are some of the techniques that you should incorporate to have a fully robust Detection & Response program that span the entire Kill Chain.

Mitiga has a nice blog about the CircleCI incident and what it means and what you should do about it. (Mitiga is a Rain investment)

A few tools worth noting here

• SOC Prime’s threat hunting tool: One of the easiest tools to help you hunt for possible threats in your environment. (A Rain investment)

• Thinkst Canary: Canary tools that help you spot breaches that have happened.

• Red teaming tools: A good list of red teaming tools, including many open source ones.

CircleCI Incident Hunting Guide

Team8 CISO Summit

The Team8 CISO summit recently returned to New York City with a focus on exploring the “Human Side” of the CISO role. The event was over-subscribed and extremely dynamic with continued engagement with the “unconference” discussions as well as the insights shared in the numerous panels and sessions.

Rain Capital was strongly represented in many sessions, panels and technology drill downs. Dr. Chenxi Wang led a star panel of CISOs to discuss CISO’s future career path and David B. Cross co-created and led the first CISOs vs Sharks for discussing ideas for emergent technology, projects for cybersecurity and the feasibility for approaches in this challenging cybersecurity world.

Team8 CISO Summit

The Perils of CIRCIA

This topic came up at the end of 2022, but we thought it was worth a mention here.

The Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA) is raising not only interest in the security leadership community, but also alarms. The ITI organization (community) published a public response on the concerns for reporting, immunity, and anonymity.

The overall CISO community has also been organizing and discussing on the potential legal risks, liability and fears of such reporting that may actually delay and harm the ability to quickly report information with known safety.

The industry needs to be able to quickly report information as soon as possible, but we need to do so without fear of retribution or lack of validation of the initial indicators or evidence. We all want to grow, seek assistance and defend together, but it must be possible with safety and lack of legal overhead that could hobble the efforts.

ITI Response

Dr. Chenxi Wang and Andrew Smyth of Atlantic Bridge undertook an open source security analysis project in the last few months and built an Open Source Security Index.

The index lists the top 100 most popular and fastest-growing security projects on GitHub. We emphasize fast growing as we believe modern security operations are different from security in the past, when most deployments happened on-premises. As such, many of the fast-growing OSS projects are newer initiatives designed for modern infrastructure environments.

Looking across the top 25 list, a few interesting trends emerge. They are:

• Attack and red-team open source tools remain popular: Metasploit, OSS Fuzz, Atomic Red Team, and Zap are a few examples.

• Security for modern infrastructure is gaining popularity: Projects such as Cilium, Trivy, Calico, and Falco are becoming increasingly popular, all of which are designed for modern and cloud-native environments.

• Automation and "as-code" workflow utilities have emerged: Projects that enable automation and "as-code" workflows have also appeared in the top list.

Rain Capital is a proud investor in SOC Prime, the largest contributor to Sigma, #5 on the open source index, and in Project Discovery, the team behind Nuclei, #25 on the list. Both projects help organizations automate security tasks. In the case of SOC Prime, it is detection and threat hunting. For Project Discovery, it is vulnerability discovery and management.

DarkReading's Article On the OSS Index

Recap of AWS re:Invent

Our team attended AWS re:Invent this year. The 10 year-old conference brought roughly 50,000 people to Vegas this year for its second post-pandemic gathering.

The keynote sessions were packed to the brim; the exhibit hall lined with booths large and small. Even the restaurants were fully booked with private events and parties.

So what did we see that was interesting at re:Invent?

• Dev-centric innovations: If software is eating the world, it makes sense to invest in capabilities that unleash developer productivity. Indeed, we saw many innovations at AWS centered around developer support. Ampt, LaunchDarkly, Snyk, and Retool are examples of those that do interesting work in accelerating software development and delivery.

• Everything-as-code: There is a major push to adopt the "as code" mindset to automate workflows and to shift left, enabling automated response and recovery. As examples, ProjectDiscovery is delivering vulnerability-management-as code. And Stanza is automating site reliability engineering tasks using operational models.

• AWS announced Security Lake: Dealing with AWS logs is a notoriously challenging problem. Organizations used to spend an enormous amount of effort to normalize, aggregate, and analyze data from disparate sources, including cloud trail, S3, WAF, etc. Worse, each security analysis would build their own data normalization/aggregation layer, duplicating storage and effort. The Amazon Security Lake represents a centralized place you can aggregate and normalize your data. Other applications can tap into the Security lake for analysis purposes. This doesn’t solve the security analysis efficiency problem entirely, but is a welcome first step by AWS to address the issue.

All in all, a great show. We also did an interview with Techstrong TV at the event, which we linked below. It was nice to see the spirit of innovation flying high at re:Invent despite the down economy. We were super energized.

Watch Our Interview At re:Invent

The Risks of Machine Learning

Photo by Alex Knight

The capabilities of AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) are growing exponentially as are the corresponding security risks and impact from such systems. We are now starting to see some great research and appearance of best practices and guidelines from governments and industry leaders in this space. One of the most recent set of recommended principles for artificial intelligence and machine learning security has been published by the NCSC in the UK Government. The Whitehouse also recently issued an AI bill of rights. We hope these efforts will help to catalyze more innovation across private and public sectors to help protect the public and mitigate risks associated with the rapid adoption of AI/ML.

Read the NCSC Article

Rain Capital News

• JupiterOne was named as one of CNBC’s Inaugural Top Startups

• Rain’s portfolio company Ox Security raises $34M in seed round.

• Rain’s portfolio company Bolster closes a $15 Million financing round to manage digital threats for global brands.

• David B. Cross was recognized in the Cyber Defense Magazine’s Top Global CISOs for 2022.

• Dr. Chenxi Wang interviewed in Medium: “Top five things we need to close the VC gender and racial gap.”

• Dr. Chenxi Wang interviewed by Microsoft’s Ann Johnson in “Shaping the future of Cyber”.