September 2024 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 September 2024 dataset — every named company, round, investor, and segment.
What September told us
September 2024 was a high-volume month with a single dominant transaction. Mastercard's $2.65B acquisition of Recorded Future is the third-largest cyber M&A event of 2024 so far, behind only the April Darktrace take-private ($5.32B) and the May AuditBoard exit ($3B). The deal pulls threat intelligence out of pure cybersecurity and into payments-risk infrastructure — an unusual category re-frame that suggests threat-intelligence-as-a-feed is becoming a horizontal product rather than a vertical security one.
Underneath the Mastercard deal, September delivered 34 funding rounds — the highest funding-round count of any month in 2024 — but disclosed capital came in at $512M, lower than every month since February. The signal is breadth without size: lots of activity at Seed and Series A (22 of 34 rounds), with no nine-figure funding events at all. Torq's $70M Series C in automation was the largest funded round of the month.
Identity and AppSec each took 5 transactions, splitting top-segment honors. The activity inside Vulnerability (4 transactions) is worth flagging — Zafran's $40M growth round, Intezer's $33M Series C, and two smaller rounds — all inside the prioritization and risk-scoring layer that has become a steadily-funded sub-segment across 2023 and 2024 even as broader Vulnerability funding has been uneven.
Stage and segment breakdown
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Seed | 11 |
| Series A | 11 |
| Series B | 2 |
| Series C | 3 |
| Growth Funding | 2 |
| Acquisition | 3 |
| Top segments | Transactions |
|---|---|
| Identity | 5 |
| AppSec | 5 |
| Vulnerability | 4 |
| Threat Intel | 3 |
| Detection/Response | 2 |
| Data | 2 |
Two deals worth your attention
Mastercard's $2.65B acquisition of Recorded Future. Mastercard acquired Recorded Future at $2.65B to fold threat intelligence into its payments-risk and fraud-prevention infrastructure. The deal is the third-largest cyber M&A event of 2024 so far and the clearest signal that threat-intelligence-as-a-feed is being repositioned as a horizontal data product, not a vertical security tool.
Torq — $70M Series C led by Evolution Equity Partners. Torq's hyperautomation platform for security operations raised $70M Series C — the largest funded round of September. The round was Torq's third tracked event and notable for landing only nine months after the company's $42M Series B in January 2024, a compressed funding cycle that mirrors the pattern Cyera ran across March and November of the same year.
Companies we've covered before
Torq first appeared in December 2021 with a $50M Series B in Automation. The company's $42M January 2024 round (also Series B classification) and $70M September 2024 Series C make Torq one of the few 2024 vendors with two appearances in the workbook within the same calendar year — a compressed funding cadence that became more visible across late 2024.
Recorded Future is acquired by Mastercard in September 2024 at $2.65B. The exit closes one of the longer-running threat-intelligence stories in the public market — Recorded Future had been Insight Partners-backed since 2019 — and is the largest disclosed Threat Intel M&A event since Google's $5.40B acquisition of Mandiant in March 2022.
The other 35 transactions are in the data feed — including the 3 acquisitions whose values never hit the press. Get September'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.