March 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 March 2023 dataset — every named company, round, investor, and segment.
What March told us
March 2023 was the highest-M&A-volume month so far this year — 11 acquisitions cleared in 30 days — but the value column was thin. Only three of the 11 carried disclosed prices and the three combined totaled $244M, with Cisco's $200M acquisition of Lightspin in cloud AppSec the largest. The high-acquisition-count, low-disclosed-value pattern echoes January's distribution (14 acquisitions, only one with a disclosed price), consistent with the workbook's longer-running pattern of mass-undisclosed M&A.
On the funding side, 41 transactions and $550M in disclosed capital ran roughly half the January and February pace. The activity skewed toward Series C and earlier — Ledger's $108M Series C in cryptocurrency wallets was the largest funded round, followed by Socure's $95M financing event in Identity, Mitiga at $45M Series A in detection, and DataDome at $42M Series C in bot management. None of these were category debuts; each was a returning vendor in the workbook. HUB Cyber Security, an Israeli data-security vendor, also reached the public market in March — through a SPAC merger (Nasdaq: HUBC) rather than a conventional IPO, one of the few cyber public-market listings the workbook has tracked through this point in 2023 and a route that persisted while the traditional IPO window stayed largely closed.
Identity led the segment mix with seven transactions, with Detection/Response second at four. The Identity density was driven by a mix of funded rounds (Socure, Britive) and acquisitions, including smaller deals that fed into the year's longer-running consolidation across identity-fraud and verification names.
Stage and segment breakdown
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Seed | 10 |
| Series A | 7 |
| Series B | 5 |
| Series C | 2 |
| Growth Funding | 4 |
| Acquisition | 11 |
| Top segments | Transactions |
|---|---|
| Identity | 7 |
| Detection/Response | 4 |
| GRC | 3 |
| Security Services | 3 |
| Network Security | 2 |
| Crypto | 2 |
Two deals worth your attention
Cisco's $200M acquisition of Lightspin. Cisco acquired Lightspin's cloud-native application protection platform at $200M — the largest disclosed M&A event of March and an early example of Cisco's pre-Splunk cyber acquisition cadence (small bolt-ons in adjacent cloud categories). The deal arrived six months before Cisco's $28B announcement to acquire Splunk and is a useful baseline for the platform's pre-megadeal M&A scale.
Ledger — $108.4M Series C in Crypto. Ledger raised $108M Series C for its cryptocurrency hardware wallet and custody platform, the largest funded round of March. The round closed in a year when most Crypto-segment activity ran small; Ledger's nine-figure event was the only one in the segment for 2023 and reinforced hardware-based wallet security as the segment's most durable line.
Companies we've covered before
Socure first appeared in March 2021 with a $100M Series D+ round in Identity, returning in November 2021 with a $450M Series D+ event at a $4.5B valuation in the same segment. The March 2023 $95M financing is Socure's third tracked event and a notable step-down in round size against the 2021 high — consistent with the broader 2023 repricing across identity-fraud names.
Lightspin first appeared in November 2020 with a $4M Seed in AppSec, returning in June 2021 with a $16M Series A in the same segment. The March 2023 $200M acquisition by Cisco closes a roughly two-and-a-half-year Seed-to-strategic arc and is one of the cleaner small-AppSec-to-platform exits the workbook tracks.
DataDome first appeared in May 2021 with a $35M Series B in bot management. The March 2023 $42M Series C continues a steady same-segment ramp — two rounds, same classification, modest step-up in size.
The other 39 transactions are in the data feed — including the 11 acquisitions whose values never hit the press. Get March'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.