Tanium cofounders Orion and David Hindawi (Credit: Timothy Archibald for Forbes)
In 2015, there were few hotter areas in Silicon Valley than cybersecurity.
As businesses around the world move their operations to the cloud, exposing themselves across thousands of devices, the risk of hackers grows--and high-profile takedowns continue of organizations as large as Target, Sony Pictures, and even the federal government's Office of Personnel Management. To combat the threat, venture capitalists are pushing hundreds of millions of dollars into cybersecurity startups, those firms that hope to outsmart (or at least out work) the hackers attempting to steal customer data and much more.
Three such startups--Tanium, Menlo Security, and Illumio--placed high on FORBES’ overall Hottest Startups list for 2015, which ranks Silicon Valley’s flashiest companies by one simple metric: the fastest growing valuations over time between funding rounds this year. That means our list captures the most in-demand startups, the ones for which investors had the highest hopes–and wrote the biggest checks.
Including those three, see the gallery below for the hottest 10 cybersecurity companies of the year:
The number one cybersecurity startup on our list is Tanium, which raised over $190 million in 2015 for a new valuation of $3.7 billion, according to Pitchbook. A father-son duo, David and Orion Hindawi, founded the company and created its unique endpoint management system. At the latest valuation, they both became billionaires by FORBES' estimate. Read more about Tanium and the Hindawis in our magazine profile from April 2015.
The runners-up both only emerged from stealth mode this year. Second on the list is Menlo Security, scored a $25 million Series B funding round in June. Menlo's system attempts to isolate malware by containing data like emails and webpages in the cloud and only delivering a mirror image to individual computers. Number three is Illumio, which raised $100 million in April at a valuation that just kicked it into billion-dollar "Unicorn" status.
See the next 7 hottest cybersecurity startups here. See all 50 hottest startups across all industries here.
The 2015 Forbes Hottest Startups lists use data from our partner, private company research firm Pitchbook. Only private companies that raised new funding rounds in 2015, analyzed via regulatory filings, were included.
