August 2021 Cyber Funding & M&A Brief
Published by Pinpoint Search Group — the cybersecurity executive search firm that tracks every disclosed vendor funding round and acquisition in the sector.
At a glance
Get the full August 2021 dataset — every named company, round, investor, and segment.
What August told us
August 2021 produced one of the workbook's most structurally lopsided months — the funded side ran the lightest disclosed-month total of 2021 so far at $423.8M across 11 disclosed rounds, while the M&A side produced the largest pure cyber-to-cyber strategic combination the workbook had tracked through this point. NortonLifeLock's $8.00B acquisition of Avast combined two publicly traded consumer cybersecurity vendors into a single platform — a public-to-public merger rather than a take-private, and a transaction that sat above March's Auth0/Okta deal ($6.50B) by $1.50B but below Proofpoint/Thoma Bravo ($12.30B from April) by $4.30B. Inside the strategic cyber-to-cyber buyer cohort specifically (where both buyer and target are operating cyber vendors), Avast/NortonLifeLock is the workbook's largest event through August 2021.
Funded-side activity was thin by volume — 11 disclosed rounds, two of which cleared at Seed or Series A — and by disclosed value. Nozomi at $100M Series D+ in IoT was the largest funded round, followed by SentiLink at $70M Series B in Identity, InfoSum at $65M Series B in Data, Upstream at $62M Series C in OT/ICS, Hunters at $30M Series B in XDR, and Finite State at $30M Series B in IoT. The composition reflected a structural pause in priced rounds rather than any category-specific cooling; the disclosed-funded total sits comparable to several 2020 months in the data set — July 2020 at $315.9M and May 2020 at $343.9M both ran lighter, and June 2020 at $444.3M ran similarly thin. IronNet, a network-security vendor, also reached the public market in August — through a SPAC merger (NYSE: IRNT) rather than a conventional IPO, a listing route distinct from the traditional cyber debuts the workbook tracked earlier in 2021.
M&A breadth ran high — 15 acquisitions cleared overall — even with only Avast carrying a nine-figure disclosed value. The Orchestration and Supply Chain segments make their first workbook appearances this month, both via acquisitions: Qualys's pickup of TotalCloud and Checkmarx's acquisition of Dustico respectively. The two segment debuts via M&A continue the pattern the workbook tracks of strategic platform buyers absorbing specialist categories at the earliest priced moments.
Stage and segment breakdown
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Seed | 1 |
| Series A | 1 |
| Series B | 7 |
| Series C | 1 |
| Series D+ | 1 |
| Acquisition | 15 |
| Top segments | Transactions |
|---|---|
| OT/ICS | 3 |
| Detection/Response | 3 |
| Identity | 2 |
| Vulnerability | 2 |
| IoT | 2 |
| Data | 2 |
New segment in the taxonomy this month: "Orchestration", "Supply Chain" enter the Pinpoint segment taxonomy for the first time in August 2021. Emergent categories are added when they first appear in vendor positioning; this is the first workbook event in this classification.
Two deals worth your attention
NortonLifeLock's $8.00B acquisition of Avast. NortonLifeLock agreed to acquire Avast at $8.00B, the largest strategic cyber-to-cyber combination the workbook has tracked through August 2021. The transaction combined two publicly traded consumer cybersecurity vendors into a single platform (a public-to-public merger rather than a take-private) and is one of the few workbook events where both buyer and target are operating cyber companies trading at scale. The deal sat above March's Auth0/Okta acquisition ($6.50B) by $1.50B in the strategic cyber-buyer cohort, but below April's Proofpoint take-private ($12.30B PE) overall. The combination created one of the largest consumer cybersecurity vendors by revenue in the data set.
Nozomi Networks — $100M Series D+ in IoT. Nozomi Networks raised $100M Series D+ for its operational technology and IoT security platform, the largest funded round of August. The round was one of only two August funded events clearing above $70M and confirmed that OT/ICS and unmanaged-device security remained an active late-stage funded category even in a structurally thin funded month.
Companies we've covered before
InfoSum first appeared in September 2020 with a $15.1M Series A in Data. The August 2021 $65M Series B is InfoSum's second tracked event, same segment classification, and a clean A-to-B step-up roughly eleven months apart inside data security and privacy-preserving analytics.
Hunters first appeared in June 2020 with a $15M Series A in XDR. The August 2021 $30M Series B is Hunters' second tracked event, same segment classification, and a 2x step-up over the prior round.
The other 25 transactions are in the data feed — including the 15 acquisitions whose values never hit the press. Get August's details and more →
Methodology
Every transaction in this brief was sourced from a primary public report and dedupe-checked against the master Pinpoint funding workbook, which now contains ~2,600 transactions back to May 2020. Funding totals reflect disclosed capital only; acquisition values are included where publicly available.
Each deal is classified against Pinpoint's normalized cybersecurity segment taxonomy — read directly off what the company says they protect and mapped to one of the canonical segments. The taxonomy has been maintained continuously since 2020 and currently covers roughly 55 segments. Identity, Data, Detection / Response, and Threat Intel have been tracked from the first month of the series; AppSec and GRC entered the following month; emergent categories (AI/LLM, Supply Chain, Quantum, Browser) are added when they first appear in vendor positioning. That normalization layer is what makes multi-year, cross-segment comparisons possible against an otherwise inconsistent vocabulary in the broader market.
About Pinpoint Search Group
Cybersecurity innovators work with Pinpoint Search Group to identify, attract, and land professionals that enable maturation, scale, and successful outcomes. As start-ups continue raising millions in funding and established vendors make acquisitions to round out their offerings, Pinpoint Search Group is keeping track.
Get the underlying data
The narrative above is the free version. The paid Pinpoint Cyber Funding Data feed gives you every named transaction, every disclosed investor, every segment classification — exportable, filterable, and updated as the deals close.