30 Top Angel Investors in Cyber

Angel investors fuel the startup eco-system. They make the first investments into a company, often based on an idea and the track record of the founders. Compared to VCs, angel investors take risks that dwarf the exposure of most VC firms. Typically an angel investor is putting his or her own money into a deal. Often the risk is spread across multiple individuals who pool their money in a so-called pre-seed round.

Angel investors have very long time-horizons. They are way early and may have to wait ten or more years for a payout when a company gets acquired or goes public. More often than not, their investments end up being worthless.

Like big funds, a way to reduce overall risk is to make many bets. Let’s look at the top 30 angel investors in cybersecurity startups to see how they are doing.

This data is pulled from the IT-Harvest Analyst Dashboard that tracks 3,622 cyber companies and 5,222 investors in 1,920 of those companies. That’s right, only 52% of all cybersecurity companies are funded.

Many angel investments do not get publicized or recorded so this data is only for known investments. Here are the TOP TEN.

Shlomo Kramer is a legend in the cybersecurity industry. He and his co-founders of Check Point Software, Gil Shwed and Marius Nacht, are early pioneers. Shlomo went on to found Imperva and is well on his way to taking a third, Cato Networks, public. His portfolio of investments outside his own companies include Palo Alto Networks, Trusteer, Exabeam, and Aqua Security. That’s an amazing track record.

Ariel Maislos is co-founder at Coho AI, a customer journey tracking solution. He is a prolific investor that is tied with Shlomo Kramer for number of cyber investments.

Also a great track record.

Zane Lackey is a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz. Like many VCs he may from time to time cut personal checks either to invest along side his funds’ investments or because the deal sizes are too small for his fund. His portfolio includes Material Security, Panther, AppOmni, and Feroot Security.

Gerhard Eschelbeck has had operations roles at Qualys, Webroot Software, Sophos and Google where he was VP Security and Privacy Engineering. In addition to making investments he is a sought-after advisor and board member. His portfolio includes 1Password, Sym, Fleet, anecdotes, Zenity, and DevOcean Security.

Aviram Jenik was co-founder of Beyond Security, a PCI compliance and vulnerability scanning company acquired by HelpSystems (now called Fortra) in 2021. He has advised or invested in 41 companies including buk.io which he arranged for me to mentor. His security investments include DeviceTotal, Cybellum, Eclypsium, and Vicarious.

George Kurtz is co-founder and CEO of Crowdstrike. His portfolio companies have all grown in headcount in 2023.

John Thompson was a 27 year IBM veteran when he was brought in to lead Symantec. He is currently a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. His side gig is Chairman of the Board at Microsoft.

Michael Fey is co-founder and CEO at Island. He was EVP and CTO at McAfee, then was brought into BlueCoat to be its President and COO, a title he kept after the merger with Symantec. His portfolio is one of the best performing in terms of 2023 growth in headcount.

Oliver Friedrichs was founder and CEO of Phantom Cyber which was acquired by Splunk. He founded Pangea in 2021.

Rakesh Loonkar was co-founder of OneSecure with Nir Zuk, one of the first IPS companies. He went on to start Trusteer which was sold to IBM. His latest company is Transmit Security which announced the biggest A round of funding for a cybersecurity company ever in 2021: a stunning $543 million.

You will recognize many of the names in this list of the next 20 angel investors in cybersecurity.

Zohar Zisapel was the co-founder of network security vendor Radware. He passed away at the age of 74 on May 20, 2023.

Most angel investors in our database have plenty of cybersecurity experience as you can see from these 30 angels. However, some have no expertise at all. Take for example the investors in 1Password, the high-flying Canadian password manager company. They include: Justin Timberlake, Ryan Renolds, Scarlett Johansson, Ashton Kutcher, Robert Downey Jr., and Matthew McConaughey.

You know how investors always claim that they bring so much more to a venture than their money? In the case of Ryan Renolds that is certainly true.