Techstars is a global platform that provides investment and innovation. Through the Techstars Worldwide Entrepreneur Network, founders and their teams connect with other entrepreneurs, experts, mentors, alumni, investors, community leaders, and corporate partners who will help their companies grow. Techstars operates four divisions: Techstars Mentorship-Driven Accelerator Program supercharges success and Techstars Startup Programs inspire, educate, and connect entrepreneurs. Techstars Venture Capital Fund invests in innovative and disruptive companies. Techstars Corporate Innovation Partnerships help brands create products and services. Techstars' accelerator portfolio includes more than 1,000 companies with a market cap of $8.1 billion.

Techstars

Elevate Capital is a seed and early-stage investment firm with a primary focus in the Pacific Northwest and investing in under-represented founders. Elevate proudly maintains a 50/50 male/female founder split among its invested portfolio and has 100% of its investments where at least one co-founder is from a minority group (East Indian, Veterans, East Asian, African American, Latino, and etc.).

Elevate Capital

TiE Angels was launched in July 2010. It is an angel investment group formed by Charter Members of TiE Silicon Valley. The mission of TiE Angels is to support top-tier emerging companies with early stage investment and support.  Since founding TiE Angels in Silicon Valley, the forum has been launched at TiE chapters in other cities including Boston, New York City, Seattle, Portland, and Atlanta.

TiE Angels

2.0 Ventures partners with visionary technology and consumer companies to hyperdrive growth and create optionality for founding teams. Through investment and key operational support, 2.0 Ventures helps founders navigate complex growth challenges and optimize their business for either a future financing, strategic exit, or sustained profitability. The Fund’s core belief is that investors and founders need to be open-minded and flexible to do what’s best for the business, and the rest will follow.

2.0 Ventures

Aura Innovation Fund established to support the company's mission of creating a safer internet by investing in early stage startups and leaders that represent the future of the industry and workforce.

Aura Innovation Fund

Chai Ventures is a NYC-based pre-seed and seed stage fund investing in women-led companies solving critical problems with businesses that deliver impact at scale across the high-growth sectors of better world, health and wellness, and human connection.  We’re focused on investing in exceptional women founders – founders who are exceptions to the rule or have been underestimated in some way. We take a full ecosystem approach to supporting women entrepreneurs by considering the pivotal role of women as both capital allocators and recipients.

Chai Ventures

HacWare

HacWare is an A.I. driven cybersecurity awareness SAAS product that combines threat intelligence with user behavior to help lean IT teams combat phishing attacks.

HacWare is an AI-driven cybersecurity awareness and training platform that helps organizations combat phishing attacks and business email compromise (BEC) scams. The company's solution integrates with email servers like Google Workspace or Office 365 and uses machine learning to analyze incoming messages for potential risks, such as suspicious links or attachments.

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AI-based solutions to level the playing field against email threats

Next-gen Email Security

‘CrowdStrike Phishing Emails To Get Worse Before Better’: HacWare CEO

HacWare is an AI-driven cybersecurity awareness and training platform that helps organizations combat phishing attacks and business email compromise (BEC) scams. The company's solution integrates with email servers like Google Workspace or Office 365 and uses machine learning to analyze incoming messages for potential risks, such as suspicious links or attachments.
HacWare's platform identifies the most vulnerable users, like those in finance or human resources departments, who are often targets of BEC attacks aimed at stealing sensitive employee data. It then sends personalized phishing simulations to these at-risk users, leveraging the contents of their inboxes to create realistic scenarios for testing and training purposes.
The company's products have helped businesses around the world reduce malware outbreaks by 60% by educating employees on cybersecurity threats and empowering them to make sound decisions. HacWare's technology automates the process of creating and deploying phishing simulations, significantly reducing the workload on IT teams.
In April 2022, HacWare raised USD 2.3 million in seed funding led by Elevate Capital, with participation from 2.0 Ventures, Aura Innovation Fund, Chai Angels, and others. The funding is being used to expand the company's engineering and sales teams, as well as its developer network for integrating HacWare's API with internal applications and HR platforms.
In November 2022, HacWare was acquired by a leading cybersecurity company.

Abnormal Security is a cloud-based email security platform that leverages AI and behavioral data science to detect and block sophisticated email attacks that evade traditional email gateways. The company's core offering is an inbound email security solution that protects against business email compromise, phishing, malware, ransomware, social engineering, and other advanced threats.
Abnormal's platform establishes a baseline of normal behavior for each employee, vendor, and application within an organization's email environment. By understanding "known good" activity patterns, the AI can precisely identify anomalies and remediate malicious emails in real-time before they reach inboxes. This behavioral analysis approach provides more effective threat detection compared to traditional email security focused on indicators of compromise.
The platform integrates directly with cloud email providers like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace via an API, enabling rapid deployment without the need for a secure email gateway. Beyond inbound email protection, Abnormal also offers account takeover protection and SOC automation capabilities.
Abnormal expanded its platform in April 2023 to provide security monitoring and threat detection for collaboration apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. By ingesting identity signals from these additional data sources, the AI models can better understand cross-channel behavior and identify lateral movement by attackers across an enterprise's cloud environment.
Key customers and partnerships
Abnormal Security works with organizations across industries including government, finance, energy, manufacturing, technology, and consulting. Notable customers include PagerDuty, UserTesting, and Vungle, amongst others.
In January 2022, Abnormal announced a partnership with Microsoft to enhance native protection capabilities within Microsoft Defender for Office 365.

Abnormal Security

Menlo Security provides cloud-based security solutions centered around its patented Isolation Core technology. This technology creates an "air gap" between users and the internet, isolating the browsing process in the cloud to protect against web-based threats like phishing, drive-by exploits, and zero-day attacks. The company's Cloud Security Platform leverages this Isolation Core to enable secure internet access and browsing without compromising user experience.
Menlo Security's solutions aim to eliminate malware infections, including ransomware, by moving the fetch and execute functions of web browsing away from users' devices and networks. Only safe, non-executable content is rendered on users' devices, providing a seamless browsing experience while mitigating risks. The platform is designed to help organizations embrace cloud transformations securely without sacrificing data visibility, control, or user experience.
In March 2019, Menlo Security partnered with By Light to deliver a cloud-based internet isolation (CBII) solution for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), protecting over 3.5 million users worldwide across the US Department of Defense and its branches. This solution leverages Menlo's Cloud Platform and Isolation Core to secure internet access for defense officials deployed globally.
In January 2023, Menlo Security's Cloud Security Platform powered by its Isolation Core received Authorization to Operate (ATO) at the moderate level under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP). The company also announced the detection of "Highly Evasive Adaptive Threats" (HEAT) that bypass traditional security defenses, highlighting the need for its Zero Trust approach.
Additionally, Menlo Security acquired an undisclosed company in February 2023, expanding its capabilities to address the evolving threat landscape.

Menlo Security

<div>
 
 Darktrace is a global cybersecurity company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect and respond to cyber threats in real-time. Founded in 2013 in Cambridge, UK, Darktrace has developed an AI-powered &quot;Enterprise Immune System&quot; that learns the normal behavior patterns within an organization's digital systems and identifies anomalies that may indicate cyber attacks or vulnerabilities.
 
 
 
 
 Darktrace's core product offerings include Darktrace PREVENT, DETECT, RESPOND, and HEAL. The PREVENT module proactively identifies risks and vulnerabilities. DETECT uses machine learning to spot threats in real-time across networks, cloud environments, IoT devices, and email systems. RESPOND provides autonomous response capabilities to contain active threats within seconds. The HEAL module, slated for release in 2023, aims to restore systems to pre-attack states.
 
 
 
 
 The company's technology can monitor up to 1 million devices and is compatible with major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Darktrace claims its AI can reduce threat investigation time by 92% compared to manual methods. The platform provides visualization tools like the Threat Visualizer to help analysts investigate anomalies.
 
 
 
 
 In April 2021, Darktrace went public on the London Stock Exchange at a USD 2.37 billion valuation. The company reported having over 9,400 customers across more than 100 countries. The company's AI cybersecurity solutions are used by organizations of all sizes across various industries.
 
 
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 
 
 
 Darktrace's client base includes notable companies like Allianz, Airbus, and the city of Las Vegas. In June 2024, Darktrace won Microsoft UK's Partner of the Year Award, highlighting the growing collaboration between the two companies. Darktrace's AI tools are now fully compatible with Microsoft Copilot for Security, allowing customers to analyze Darktrace's security data using natural language processing. This integration aims to speed up threat response and investigations for joint customers.
 
</div>

Darktrace

Material Security is an email security company that pioneered the use of zero-trust techniques to protect email accounts and their contents. The company's platform automatically classifies and reacts to sensitive content in emails, securing critical messages without impacting productivity. Its key product offerings include account takeover protection, which prevents attackers from hijacking other services by adding a verification step before granting access to password resets and critical messages. The platform also offers phishing "herd immunity" that allows a single report from any employee to protect the entire organization instantly.
Material Security provides visibility and control over an organization's entire email footprint, surfacing foundational risk factors and offering one-click remediation tools claimed to expedite investigations. The service integrates with Office 365 and Google Workspace via APIs without affecting MX records or email delivery. As of May 2022, the company served customers such as Chubb Ltd., Compass Group plc, Roblox Corp., Brex Inc., Lyft Inc., Mars Inc., Databricks Inc., and DoorDash Inc.
In May 2022, Material Security raised USD 100 million in Series C funding at a USD 1.1 billion valuation, achieving unicorn status just two years after its official product launch. The company planned to use the funding to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering teams, extend into new areas like government, and grow internationally. As of May 2024, Material Security had been acquired, with details of the acquisition included in the "Overview" section.

Material Security

Tessian is an email security company that focuses on protecting enterprises from threats arising due to human error. It leverages machine learning to build behavioral models for all employees and automatically detect security threats such as business email compromise, data exfiltration, phishing, and accidental data loss. Tessian's platform, referred to as "human layer security," notifies employees of these issues to help improve individual security behaviors.
In May 2021, Tessian had raised a total of USD 123.7 million in funding and was valued at USD 500 million. At that time, the company planned to invest in research and development, expand its product offerings beyond email security, and grow its workforce globally.
Tessian's approach proved effective, as evidenced by a report from July 2022 that found US employees sent an average of four emails to the wrong person each month in the first nine months of 2021. Nearly one-third of employees who reported such incidents indicated their business lost a client or customer due to the error.
In December 2023, Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity and compliance company, acquired Tessian. The acquisition aimed to combine Proofpoint's threat and data loss protection technology with Tessian's AI-powered behavioral and dynamic detection capabilities. This integration was expected to provide organizations with a comprehensive defense against human-targeted threats and prevent data loss across various collaboration channels.

Tessian

Solutions that use AI to detect and block email-based attacks including phishing, business email compromise, malware, impersonation, spam, and data exfiltration.

Solutions that use AI to eliminate email-based attacks caused by inadvertent or malicious acts by internal users from leaving the network.

Solutions that encrypt emails for secure access and collaboration.

Solutions that automatically detect and prevent accidental data loss caused by sending emails to the wrong recipients or with wrong attachments.

Solutions that provide user awareness training on email-based threats.

Solutions that securely store emails in an accessible location for future retrieval.

Uses AI/ML and behavioral analysis to detect suspicious activity in emails

Uses NLP to detect suspicious activity in emails

Solutions in this industry hub are offered under a B2B SaaS model

HacWare

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