One week is not a market, so here is the number that made me take it seriously. The Mandos platform tracks 192 companies whose main business is human risk, awareness training, phishing simulation and the like, and together they have raised $3.5B across 26 countries. This week two of its companies changed hands in one announcement, Cyberly and OutKept, both absorbed into Aikido's Noon as the training and simulation parts of a product that also does email and device security. Cyberly had more than 200 customer organisations and 300,000 people under its simulations, and it still went for an undisclosed price into an AppSec platform.
Here is why I think that happened. Awareness training has a ceiling set by headcount, and the budget line shrinks when the email or AppSec vendor adds the same simulations to a product the customer already pays for. Software actors have no ceiling, because a company adds agents faster than it adds people, and every new agent, bot or sandbox is more work for the control that sits in front of it. Blackwall's job grows with request volume, Daytona's with the number of agent sandboxes and Ultra's with tool calls, while a training vendor's job grows only with headcount, and my read is that investors are paying for the side that compounds.
If you're a founder with a product about people, insider risk, training, identity proofing, this is the week to decide which platform you end up inside, because the exit list is email security, AppSec and the certification bodies, and they set the price. If your product is about what software may do, the money is there, but so is the crowd: 147 companies on the Mandos platform now mention MCP in their product description, they average 37 employees and they have raised $2.5B together.
If you're an investor, I'd separate the two late rounds from the two seeds. Blackwall and Daytona have a volume metric a customer already pays on, which is a business. Ultra and Asymptote have a control point that two companies claimed in the same week, which is a race, and the question to ask is what the product sees that the agent's own vendor cannot add in a quarter.
Through the eyes of a CISO buyer, the human side of your program is about to get cheaper and less visible at the same time. Expect awareness training to arrive inside a bill you already pay, which is fine as long as you still get the report, and expect your agent controls to come from companies younger than your contract term, which is fine as long as the agent still works when you switch the vendor off. I'd write both into the contract.
Where I could be wrong: the biggest number of the week, Maximus paying $660M for Agile Defense, bought 1,100 cleared people, so if you count services, the humans won the week by a mile. And Blackwall is a 2019 company selling to hosting providers, which is a story about infrastructure more than about AI agents; take it out and the machine share of the week's funding is still 82%.
Still, categories get sorted like this every time. The product that scales with people gets bundled, and the product that scales with machines gets funded, and this week the market said it in dollars.
- Rein Security changed its homepage label from "Enterprise AI Security" to "Enterprise Agent Security" and its headline from "The Security Layer for Enterprise AI" to "See and control every agent." between 21 and 24 October.
- NewCore swapped "The next-gen IdP for humans and AI agents." for "Put AI agents to work. Keep people in charge." between 19 and 22 October, with a new line underneath: "AI agents arrived. Accountability didn't."
- Cloudsmith moved from "Control and security for your AI-driven software supply chain" to "Artifact management and security for the AI software supply chain" between 19 and 22 October, and its "single source of truth for every package and container" now ends "used by developers and AI agents".
- Exabeam replaced "The Agentic SOC, Delivered. Secure humans and agents at machine speed." with "Defend at Machine Speed with the Agentic SOC. Stop insider threats: Human or AI." between 20 and 23 October.
- Zafran retired "Patches take weeks. Exploits take hours. Zafran takes minutes." for "Expose the 1% of vulnerabilities that are exploitable. Neutralize with your compensating controls. Fix the rest." between 21 and 24 October.
- Cribl added a consumption model to its pricing page between 5 and 21 October: "$1 = 1 credit", three Workspaces included for Enterprise, 250 credits per extra Workspace per month, and metered static egress from 0.18 credits an hour.
One question
If you're building or backing a product whose subject is a person, training, insider risk, identity proofing: what do you sell on the day the email or AppSec vendor bundles your feature into its own product? Reply and tell me. The best replies get quoted, anonymously, next week.
Thank you for reading.
If you want more than the newsletter: get the full market picture on the Mandos platform, and if you are building or investing in this space, let's talk.
Talk to you next Monday.
Nikoloz
