Keyfactor takes $1B. Summit Partners leads a billion-dollar growth round for the machine-identity and PKI platform, the month's largest deal.

ThreatLocker raises $189M at a valuation above $1.6B, with Onyx ($113M), Cape ($100M), Neo Security ($100M) and Glow ($100M) all landing nine-figure rounds.

Machine identity everywhere. Cyera agreed to buy Oasis for ~$1B, Okta bought Permiso, Keyfactor bought Cofide, and Hush raised $30M from Akamai.

Akamai buys LayerX for $205M and Qualcomm buys SAM Seamless for $100M.

This month's Trident View: we are at Black Hat, come and find me.

This month's Insider Insight: July by the numbers, and the one figure that reversed.

I am writing this from Las Vegas, running on very little sleep.

We landed Sunday night. Monday was the pre-parties, all of them, and it was a big one. Tonight it is our turnwith karaoke at the House of Blues inside the Mandalay, and I would apologise in advance except… I am not sorry at all.

Most of the team is out here for the full week of Black Hat, and there is a reason we come in numbers rather than send one person, something I have been harping on about for the past 3 weeks! This is the one week a year when the entire industry we work in is standing in the same few square miles, and you cannot build the kind of business we are trying to build from behind a screen.

and, while it would be obtuse not to say we are here to win new business and continue to build Trident, the real reason is to meet all the unbelievable people that continue to make it possible for us to do this (bring out the tissues).

So here is my ask from behind the curtain, and I mean it. If you read this newsletter, I would genuinely love to meet you. It is a strange and slightly surreal thing to write something every week and not know most of the people reading it, and this is the one week I can do something about that.

Come and find me. Reply to this email, grab me in a hallway, catch me at a party. Whether you are a founder trying to work out your first commercial hire, someone quietly weighing your own next move, or you just want to argue with me about where this market is heading, I am here for all of it. No pitch, no agenda, just a conversation.

I will be around all week, and yes, you will probably be able to hear the karaoke from the strip. Come say hello.

See you out there!

ThreatLocker
Series F, $189.2M (Elephant Partners)
The zero-trust endpoint protection platform raised one of the largest cyber rounds of the month, lifting a valuation last reported at $1.6 billion. Other investors: D. E. Shaw Ventures, Arthur Ventures and Koch Disruptive Technologies.

Category: Endpoint / Zero Trust
HQ: Orlando, FL

Elliptic
Series D, $120M (One Peak Partners)
Blockchain analytics used by banks, exchanges and law-enforcement agencies to trace illicit crypto flows, at a $670 million post-money valuation. Other investors: Nasdaq Ventures, Evolution Equity Partners and Circle Ventures.

Category: Financial Crime / Blockchain Analytics
HQ: London, United Kingdom

Onyx
Series B, $113M (Bessemer Venture Partners)
An enterprise AI security platform building a Secure AI Control Plane to discover, govern and monitor the AI agents organisations are deploying, at a $527 million pre-money valuation. Other investors: TCV, FirstMark Capital, CyberStarts, Conviction Partners and G Squared.

Category: AI / Agent Security
HQ: New York, NY

Cape
Series C, $100M (Bain Capital Ventures, IVP)
A privacy-first mobile carrier built for security, protecting users from location tracking and network-level surveillance, at an $845.9 million pre-money valuation. Other investors: XYZ Venture Capital, Costanoa Ventures, 01 Advisors and 137 Ventures.

Category: Mobile Security
HQ: Arlington, VA

Glow
Series B and B-1, $100M (Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, CyberStarts)
Endpoint security for the modern workspace, using specialised agents to build a single source of truth across devices, at a $1.1 billion pre-money valuation. Other investors: Index Ventures, Lux Capital and Greenoaks.

Category: Endpoint Security
HQ: Palo Alto, CA

Neo Security
Series A, $100M (Bessemer Venture Partners, Craft Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz)
Out of stealth with a platform for secure collaboration between people and AI, offering private models, controlled AI personas and auditable multi-agent workflows. Other investors: Merlin Ventures.

Category: AI Security
HQ: Boston, MA

Valarian
Series A, $50M (New Enterprise Associates)
Secure data compartmentalisation and communications infrastructure built to enforce digital sovereignty for governments and critical enterprises. Other investors: XTX Ventures, Lightbank and Scout Ventures.

Category: Sovereign / Secure Infrastructure
HQ: London, United Kingdom

Inforcer
Series C, $48.9M (Insight Partners)
A multi-tenant security management platform for managed service providers, standardising and automating Microsoft security across client estates, at a pre-money valuation of about $340 million.

Category: MSP Security
HQ: Richmond, United Kingdom

Arkenstone Defense
Seed, $43M (J2 Ventures)
Federal contracting software that strips the friction out of selling technology into the national-security market, at a $75 million post-money valuation. Other investors: Tau Ventures and Evolution VC Partners.

Category: GovTech / Defence
HQ: Menlo Park, CA

Act Security
Series A, $40M (Notable Capital)
An AI security platform, raising a large Series A as enterprises race to secure their AI deployments. Other investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, Hetz Ventures, Lux Capital and Team8.

Category: AI Security
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel

DataBahn
Series B, $39.1M (Insight Partners)
A security data pipeline platform that filters and enriches telemetry before it hits the SIEM, at a $228 million pre-money valuation. Other investors: Forgepoint Capital, S3 Ventures and GTM Capital.

Category: Security Data / SecOps
HQ: Plano, TX

AegisAI
Series A, $36M (Battery Ventures)
Autonomous AI email security, deploying a fleet of agents to inspect and neutralise phishing and other inbox threats. Other investors: Accel and Foundation Capital.

Category: Email Security / AI
HQ: New York, NY

Mate Security
Series A, $35M (Canaan Partners)
AI-native security operations built on a context layer, so AI agents investigate alerts against how the business actually runs. Revenue is up more than 500% since Q3 2025. Other investors: Insight Partners, Team8, and M12, Microsoft's venture fund.

Category: Security Operations / AI
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel

Way Security
Series A, $30.5M (Insight Partners, Glilot Capital)
An identity security platform helping large enterprises manage overwhelming identity operations at scale. Other investors: Flex Capital.

Category: Identity
HQ: San Francisco, CA

Hush Security
Series A, $30M (Akamai Technologies, Battery Ventures, YL Ventures)
Non-human identity and AI-agent governance, eliminating standing access by granting scoped, just-in-time permissions at runtime. The round brings total funding to $41 million.

Category: Non-Human Identity
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel

July's mid-market ran deep. Empirical Security ($25M, predictive vulnerability management from the Kenna and EPSS founders), Abstract Security ($25M), Cranium AI ($20M, AI governance), Nebulock ($25M threat hunting) and Risk Ledger ($32M supply-chain security) all raised, alongside a long tail of seed and undisclosed rounds across identity, AI security and email defence. All told, July saw around 78 disclosed cyber venture rounds.

Oasis Security → Acquired by Cyera
Deal Type: Acquisition (letter of intent)
Deal Date: July 2026
Deal Size: ~$1B (reported)

The month's defining deal. Cyera, the data-security unicorn valued at $12 billion after its recent $600 million raise, signed a letter of intent to acquire the Israeli non-human identity firm Oasis Security for around a billion dollars, roughly $700 million of it in cash. Oasis, founded in 2022, had closed a $120 million Series B led by Craft Ventures just four months earlier. It is the loudest single signal yet of where cyber's money is going, and it made Oasis one of the two independent targets we named in our June Bold Call.

Permiso → Acquired by Okta (NASDAQ: OKTA)
Deal Type: Acquisition (definitive agreement)
Deal Date: July 30, 2026
Deal Size: ~$200M (estimated)

The identity giant moves on identity threat detection. Permiso specialises in detecting and responding to identity-based attacks across cloud environments, and Okta has agreed to acquire it for an estimated $200 million, with completion expected by the end of September. Another incumbent buying rather than building in the identity layer.

LayerX → Acquired by Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) for $205M
SAM Seamless Network → Acquired by Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) for $100M

Two more strategics buying in. Akamai took the browser-security firm LayerX for $205 million, extending enterprise security into the browser, where most SaaS and AI usage now happens. Qualcomm bought the connected-device security firm SAM Seamless for $100 million, a natural fit for a chipmaker sitting inside billions of those devices.

Cofide → Acquired by Keyfactor through an LBO. Non-human identity, folded into a platform with a billion dollars of fresh capital to spend.
Permiso, Cartagon and a steady run of managed-security and consultancy roll-ups rounded out a busy month for buyers.

Private equity stayed heavily active, led by the month's single largest deal.

Keyfactor → PE Growth, an estimated $1B (Summit Partners and others). A billion dollars of growth capital for machine-identity and PKI management, one of the largest private investments in cyber this year, and a direct bet on the same non-human identity thesis driving the Cyera and Okta deals.
SPUR → PE Growth, $200M (Insight Partners). Growth capital for IP-intelligence and fraud-prevention data.
Secturion Systems → Buyout by The Carlyle Group. Hardware data-encryption appliances, a defence and government mainstay, taken private by one of the largest names in PE.

The through-line has not changed: private equity keeps working the profitable, defence-grade and services layers of cyber, from encryption hardware to MSP tooling, as hard as the venture crowd works the AI end.

July was another heavy month at the base of the market, with around 30 cyber companies ceasing operations. Among them:

As we set out in a recent weekly, compliance and authentication tooling keeps taking the heaviest losses, the layer most easily absorbed into a platform or replaced by an AI-native rival.

Every month we read every cyber deal so you do not have to. Here is what July actually looked like once you add it all up.

The headline reversed. For the first time since spring, more cyber companies raised money than were bought: 78 venture rounds against 52 acquisitions and buyouts. Through the second quarter, consolidation had run ahead of creation every month. July broke the streak. It is one month, not a trend, but it is worth marking, because it is the first sign that the venture taps have not run dry, they have just narrowed.

And narrow they are. July's roughly $1.4 billion of disclosed venture funding went to a familiar few. The ten largest rounds took 63% of all the money. The median round was just under $10 million. Six companies raised $100 million or more, while two dozen raised less than $5 million. If you are in the middle, the squeeze we have written about all year has not eased.

AI still takes the lion's share. Around 70% of every venture dollar went to companies built on AI. Whether you are securing data, identities or inboxes, the capital is flowing to the AI-native story, and the handful of large non-AI rounds, ThreatLocker aside, were the exception.

The shakeout did not pause. Around 30 cyber companies shut their doors in July, roughly the same rate as every month this year. The base of the market keeps thinning even as the top keeps raising, which is the defining tension of cyber in 2026 in a single line.

But one theme drowned out the rest. If July had a signature, it was machine identity. Cyera agreed to buy Oasis for a billion dollars. Okta bought Permiso. Keyfactor took a billion in fresh capital and bought Cofide. Hush raised $30 million, Way took $30.5 million. Non-human identity was in roughly a quarter of the month's notable deals, a category that barely existed two years ago now pulling in capital and acquisitions faster than anything else in security.

The Trident Take: the reversal is the interesting part for anyone building a team. A month where funding outpaces acquisition means new companies with fresh capital and headcount to fill, which is hiring demand that the pure consolidation of the second quarter was quietly removing. But the concentration means that demand is uneven, clustered at the well-funded winners and the handful of hot categories, machine identity chief among them, rather than spread across the market. Read the funding, and you can read the hiring. Right now both point to the same short list of companies, and we spend our days knowing exactly who is on it.

Ready to make your next move? These roles won't stay open long.

One prediction per month.

August 2026 Prediction: A major platform acquires an AI-agent-security startup founded in the last two years for $500 million or more, before the end of 2026.

The Logic: This is the direct sequel to what just happened in identity. Two years ago, non-human identity was a niche. This month Cyera paid around a billion dollars for a four-year-old company in that category, Okta bought Permiso, and Keyfactor bought Cofide, all inside a few weeks. Categories in cyber now run the same course at compressed speed: niche, then a funding wave, then a bidding war. AI-agent security, the layer that governs what autonomous agents are allowed to do rather than merely who they are, is next in that sequence and roughly a year behind identity. The funding wave is already here, with Neo Security, Act Security and Mate all raising large rounds this month to secure enterprise AI. The enterprises deploying agents need this now, the expertise sits in a handful of very young teams, and every platform that missed the first wave of identity will not want to miss this one. When the acquisition comes, it will be for a company most people have not heard of, at a price that makes sense only if you believe agents are about to be everywhere. What could prove us wrong is that the category is young enough that the biggest names may still be too early to buy, and a marquee deal could slip into 2027, which is exactly what makes calling it for this year bold.

Prediction Tracker

Note on the June call: we named Oasis Security and Token Security as the independent targets to watch. Cyera has now agreed to buy Oasis, reportedly for around a billion dollars. The thesis is playing out in real time.

Have market intelligence to share? Our network sees deals before they're announced, hiring freezes before they're public, and technology shifts before they hit the headlines.

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