2023 SC Awards Finalists: Most Promising Early-Stage Start Up  

Dazz, an early-stage start-up, addresses the challenge of managing vulnerabilities in public cloud software development with its flagship offering, the Dazz Remediation Cloud. The solution maps customers’ code-to-production pipelines, streamlines remediation, and reduces time to remediate (MTTR) by offering full pipeline visibility and cutting through alert noise. Founded in 2021, Dazz has grown to serve 25 customers, primarily in the F1000, and has raised $60 million in funding. The company has filed several patents and is engaged in R&D efforts for features such as automated root cause analysis, pipeline security assessment, and code owner identification. Dazz’s mission is to improve cloud security and reduce friction between security and development teams.

DoControl, a finalist for Most Promising Early-Stage Start-Up, offers a No-Code SaaS Security Platform that addresses the security challenges posed by increasing SaaS utilization in enterprises. The platform provides full asset management, real-time user activity monitoring, and automated remediation. It also recently launched a Shadow Apps solution to protect against SaaS supply chain attacks. Its platform differs from competitors as it can remediate risk in an automated fashion, allowing security teams to enforce strong data access control policies across disparate applications.

HiddenLayer, an Austin-based AI Application Security startup, has been recognized as a finalist for Most Promising Early-Stage Startup. The company offers a comprehensive security platform to protect machine learning models without adding complexity or requiring access to raw data and algorithms. Founded in March 2022, HiddenLayer is backed by cybersecurity investment firm Ten Eleven Ventures. Their flagship offering, HiddenLayer MLDR, is a first-of-its-kind cybersecurity solution that monitors and responds to Adversarial Machine Learning attacks. The company has a strong customer base, with over fifty commercial and government accounts in various stages of the sales funnel. HiddenLayer has raised $6 million in seed funding, with 1011 Partners as the largest external investor.

Nudge Security, a finalist for Most Promising Early-Stage Start-Up, tackles the security challenges posed by shadow IT, a complex network of SaaS applications, identities, supply chains, and integrations that emerge from decentralized business units and individual employees. The company combats threat actors like the LAPSUS$ group, which exploited this lack of oversight to target companies like Okta, CircleCI, and MailChimp in 2022. Nudge Security’s innovative SaaS solution involves engaging the same employees who create shadow IT. With read-only API access to Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, the patent-pending approach inventories every SaaS and cloud asset in an organization and alerts users when new assets are created. The platform enriches this data with vendor security and risk insights, triggering automated playbooks that prompt employees to take security measures like enabling MFA. In April 2022, the company raised $7M in seed funding led by Ballistic Ventures.

Valence Security, a SaaS security startup, is a finalist for the Most Promising Early-Stage Start-Up award. The company addresses the increasing security challenges businesses face due to SaaS misconfigurations, supply chain attacks, and third-party integrations. Valence offers a comprehensive solution, providing visibility into the entire SaaS risk surface while enabling businesses to automate risk reduction. The company has a growing customer base, with 30+ clients from various industries in the US and EMEA, experiencing a 350% YoY growth rate. Valence has raised $32 million through two investment rounds, with notable investors including Microsoft’s M12, Porsche Ventures, and Akamai. Valence’s innovation lies in its tailored remediation workflows, which allow customers to mitigate risks associated with decentralized SaaS adoption. The platform offers automated remediation of SaaS risks, collaboration between security teams and business users, and enhanced security for SaaS-to-SaaS integrations.