2025 SC Awards Finalists: Most Promising Early-Stage Start Up  

Cybersecurity leaders often focus on human identities, but non-human identities (NHIs) pose an equally dangerous risk — a challenge that Entro Security is uniquely addressing. Their platform provides full lifecycle management for machine identities, API keys, service accounts, and credentials, automating risk assessment and IAM policy enforcement to prevent privilege escalation and credential abuse. As the only dedicated NHI security solution with dozens of paying customers, Entro has positioned itself as a category-defining company. Backed by a $6 million seed round, they are expanding their research and development efforts to enhance AI-driven risk detection and automated security responses. By providing real-time visibility into NHIs across multi-cloud environments, Entro is ensuring that organizations can safeguard every identity in their ecosystem — human and non-human alike.

Managing security operations across hybrid environments is an ongoing challenge for CISOs, and Onyxia Cyber has developed a next-gen Cybersecurity Management Platform that addresses visibility gaps, risk prioritization, and operational efficiency. Their solution integrates AI-driven automation to streamline security workflows, prioritize threats, and align security posture with business objectives. Since launching in early 2024, Onyxia has seen rapid customer adoption, proving the market demand for a centralized security management solution. With seed funding propelling their growth, they are investing heavily in independent research and user-driven innovation to refine predictive risk modeling and AI-driven remediation. As cybersecurity leaders seek greater operational clarity and efficiency, Onyxia is emerging as an indispensable tool for modern security teams.

The modern cloud landscape is rife with fragmented visibility and identity-based threats, and Permiso Security is tackling this challenge head-on. Their flagship offering focuses on cloud detection and response (CDR), giving security teams deep visibility into cloud identities and behaviors to detect, investigate, and mitigate threats before they escalate. Trusted by Fortune 500 enterprises, Permiso has gained rapid traction among organizations struggling with cloud security blind spots. Their $28.5 million in funding over two rounds has enabled them to enhance their platform, reinforcing threat detection and response capabilities across multi-cloud environments. With a strong commitment to R&D, Permiso is continuously innovating to stay ahead of evolving attack patterns, making them a standout finalist for Most Promising Early-Stage Start-Up.

The complexity of artificial intelligence and machine learning security presents an entirely new attack surface, and Protect AI is pioneering a solution to safeguard it. Their platform detects and mitigates vulnerabilities across AI/ML supply chains, ensuring that models, data, and pipelines remain secure against adversarial threats. Over the past year, Protect AI has emerged as a leader in AI security, attracting major enterprises seeking to protect their AI-driven initiatives. Their $60 million Series A funding round (August 2024) underscores investor confidence in their ability to define and dominate the AI security market. With a strong focus on continuous innovation, Protect AI is constantly refining its tools to address new threats targeting AI ecosystems, making them one of the most exciting cybersecurity startups to watch.

In a world where security teams are overwhelmed by cloud and SaaS sprawl, Simbian delivers autonomous security insights powered by AI. Their platform automatically discovers, analyzes, and remediates misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, and shadow IT across cloud environments, enabling organizations to enforce security policies without the burden of manual oversight. Having just emerged from stealth in April 2024, Simbian has already made waves with $10 million in oversubscribed seed funding and a fast-growing customer base. Their team, composed of AI, security, and enterprise software veterans, is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of cloud security automation. By leveraging AI-driven contextual analysis, Simbian is helping organizations enforce Zero Trust policies at scale, making them one of the most disruptive cybersecurity startups to watch.