February 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 February 2023 dataset — every named company, round, investor, and segment.
What February told us
February 2023 ran $1.38B in disclosed funding across 33 transactions and produced the second large take-private of 2023 in as many months. Francisco Partners' $1.70B agreement to acquire Sumo Logic followed Thoma Bravo's January Magnet Forensics deal, extending the multi-year pattern of PE-led private exits for mid-cap cyber names that began with SailPoint, Ping Identity, and KnowBe4 in 2022. Sumo Logic had traded publicly since 2020 at valuations above $2B; the private exit at $1.70B is consistent with the broader repricing of post-2020 IPO cyber names.
On the funding side, two events accounted for more than half the month's disclosed total. SandboxAQ's $500M Series B in Quantum was the largest funded round of 2023 so far and the only nine-figure Quantum-segment event the workbook has tracked. Wiz's $300M Series D+ in Cloud followed two months after the company's prior round and continued the most consistent multi-year funding arc in cyber — five rounds across three years, all in Cloud, all at increasing scale.
Underneath the two large rounds, the month's 27 funding events skewed early-stage with 18 at Seed or Series A. The named Seed and A rounds were spread across Identity (Descope at $53M Seed), Detection (deepwatch's $180M growth round), Data (Chain Reaction at $70M Series C), and Vulnerability (Skybox Security at $50M growth) — a breadth pattern that matched February 2022's distribution even as average check sizes ran smaller.
Stage and segment breakdown
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Seed | 12 |
| Series A | 6 |
| Series B | 4 |
| Series C | 1 |
| Series D+ | 1 |
| Growth Funding | 3 |
| Acquisition | 6 |
| Top segments | Transactions |
|---|---|
| Identity | 5 |
| MSSP | 3 |
| Vulnerability | 3 |
| Data | 3 |
| Threat Intel | 2 |
| 2 |
Two deals worth your attention
Francisco Partners' $1.70B acquisition of Sumo Logic. Francisco Partners agreed to take Sumo Logic private at $1.70B, the second large 2023 take-private after January's Magnet Forensics deal. Sumo had IPO'd in 2020 at a valuation above $2B; the private exit completed a roughly two-and-a-half-year public-market arc and reinforced the year's pattern of PE-led repricing for cyber-adjacent observability and SIEM names.
SandboxAQ — $500M Series B in Quantum. SandboxAQ raised $500M Series B for its post-quantum cryptography and AI platform — the largest funded round of February and the largest 2023 funded event so far. The round is the only nine-figure Quantum-segment event the workbook has tracked, and the first signal that post-quantum security is becoming an investable category in its own right rather than a research-stage line item.
Companies we've covered before
Wiz first appeared in December 2020 with a $100M Series A in Cloud, returning across three further rounds through 2021. The February 2023 $300M Series D+ is Wiz's fifth tracked event in three years — same segment classification across every round, which makes Wiz the cleanest single-segment multi-round arc in the workbook.
Sumo Logic first appeared in August 2020 with a $100M IPO event, then classified under Threat Intel. The February 2023 $1.70B exit to Francisco Partners closes a roughly two-and-a-half-year public-market arc and is the longest IPO-to-take-private span tracked in this batch.
deepwatch first appeared in October 2020 with a $53M Series B in Detection/Response. The February 2023 $180M growth round is deepwatch's second workbook appearance, same segment, and reinforces MDR as one of the steadier mid-decade growth categories.
The other 31 transactions are in the data feed — including the 6 acquisitions whose values never hit the press. Get February'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.