December 2023 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 December 2023 dataset — every named company, round, investor, and segment.
What December told us
December 2023 closed the year quietly — 26 transactions and $385M in disclosed funding, the lightest month of 2023. M&A produced two acquisitions and one disclosed value: Okta's $100M pickup of Spera in Identity. The Okta/Spera deal closes a fast Seed-to-strategic arc — Spera had only raised a $10M Seed in March 2023 — and is one of the shortest such cycles the workbook tracks for an Okta transaction.
Funding activity carried 24 rounds with no single event clearing above $50M. Andalusia Labs at $48M Series A in GRC was the largest funded round, followed by SimSpace at $45M in security training, Halcyon at $40M Series B in detection, and ArmorCode at $40M Series B in AppSec. Six of the 24 rounds cleared at Series B — the highest Series B count of any 2023 month except June — suggesting the early-stage cohort that had funded across 2021-2022 was working through its first growth events as the year closed.
Halcyon's Series B is worth flagging as a recurring entry. The company had raised a $50M Series A in April 2023, eight months before this $40M Series B — a compressed eight-month cadence inside the same Detection/Response segment classification. The other notable recurring vendor of the month was ArmorCode, raising its fourth tracked Seed/A/B sequence inside AppSec since 2021.
Stage and segment breakdown
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Seed | 9 |
| Series A | 5 |
| Series B | 6 |
| Acquisition | 2 |
| Top segments | Transactions |
|---|---|
| GRC | 3 |
| Detection/Response | 2 |
| Crypto | 2 |
| IoT | 2 |
| Threat Intel | 2 |
| Network Security | 2 |
Two deals worth your attention
Okta's $100M acquisition of Spera. Okta acquired Spera at $100M, the only disclosed M&A event of December. Spera had only raised a $10M Seed in March 2023 — a roughly nine-month Seed-to-strategic arc, one of the shortest Okta acquisition cycles the workbook tracks. The deal folds Spera's identity security posture management capability into Okta's broader identity platform.
Andalusia Labs — $48M Series A in GRC. Andalusia Labs raised $48M Series A for its GRC platform, the largest funded round of December. The round was the only Series A of 2023 to clear above $40M in the GRC segment and a useful closing data point for a year in which GRC funding had been steady-state rather than spiking, with most rounds in the segment landing in the $20-30M range.
Companies we've covered before
Halcyon first appeared in April 2023 with a $50M Series A in Detection/Response. The December 2023 $40M Series B is Halcyon's second tracked event, same segment classification, and a compressed eight-month cadence between rounds — one of the faster A-to-B trajectories the workbook tracks inside ransomware-defense detection.
ArmorCode first appeared in May 2021 with a $3M Seed in AppSec, returning in January 2022 with an $8M Seed extension and November 2022 with a $14M Series A in the same segment. The December 2023 $40M Series B is ArmorCode's fourth tracked event — same segment classification across all four rounds — and one of the cleaner four-round single-segment arcs in the workbook.
Spera first appeared in March 2023 with a $10M Seed in Identity. The December 2023 $100M acquisition by Okta closes a roughly nine-month Seed-to-strategic arc and is one of the shortest single-vendor full-cycle events the workbook tracks inside the same calendar year.
The other 24 transactions are in the data feed — including the 2 acquisitions whose values never hit the press. Get December'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.