May 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 May 2023 dataset — every named company, round, investor, and segment.
What May told us
May 2023 produced the third large take-private of the year. Crosspoint Capital Partners' $870M acquisition of Absolute Software anchored the M&A column and extended the take-private thread that had run through January (Magnet Forensics) and February (Sumo Logic). With Absolute, the three large take-privates inside five months totaled more than $3.9B in withdrawn public-market value, more than any prior five-month window the workbook has tracked.
Funding activity ran the lightest of the year so far — 32 transactions, $407M in disclosed capital. The largest funded round was Auradine's $81M Series A in cryptocurrency mining infrastructure security; the second was SourcePass at $65M growth in the MSSP channel. The absence of nine-figure funded rounds for the first time in 2023 is a useful baseline rather than a finding — 23 of the 29 funding rounds were Seed or Series A, consistent with the year's broader early-stage distribution.
Supply Chain led the segment mix with five transactions, including Stacklok at $17.5M Series A. The breadth — Stacklok plus four smaller events — is the largest single-month Supply Chain count the workbook has tracked so far and a useful data point for a category that has been growing slowly across 2022 and into 2023. M&A volume was the lowest of any 2023 month so far — three deals — but the two disclosed values combined for $930M, driven entirely by the Absolute take-private.
Stage and segment breakdown
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Seed | 16 |
| Series A | 7 |
| Series C | 1 |
| Growth Funding | 3 |
| Acquisition | 3 |
| Top segments | Transactions |
|---|---|
| Supply Chain | 5 |
| GRC | 4 |
| Fraud | 3 |
| Detection/Response | 2 |
| Crypto | 2 |
| Data | 2 |
Two deals worth your attention
Crosspoint Capital Partners' $870M acquisition of Absolute Software. Crosspoint took Absolute Software private at $870M, the largest disclosed M&A event of May and the third large take-private of 2023. The deal added to the year's pattern of PE-led private exits for public cyber mid-caps, with Crosspoint joining Thoma Bravo (January's Magnet Forensics) and Francisco Partners (February's Sumo Logic) as the buyer cohort driving the thread.
Auradine — $81M Series A in Crypto. Auradine raised $81M Series A for its cryptocurrency mining infrastructure security platform, the largest funded round of May. The round was an outlier in size for a Crypto-segment Series A — most 2023 Crypto activity ran at smaller check sizes — and the only round in the month to clear above $70M.
Companies we've covered before
Huntress first appeared in May 2021 with a $40M Series B in Detection/Response, returning in September 2022 with a $40M financing event in the same segment. The May 2023 $60M Series C is Huntress's third tracked event — same segment classification across all three — and the largest of the series to that point.
Polar Security first appeared in January 2022 with an $8.5M Seed in Data security. The May 2023 $60M acquisition by IBM closes a roughly 16-month Seed-to-strategic arc and is one of the earlier examples of data-security tuck-in M&A from a major platform vendor.
The other 30 transactions are in the data feed — including the 3 acquisitions whose values never hit the press. Get May'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.