September 2026 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 2026 dataset — every named company, round, investor, and segment.
What September told us
September was the busiest month the workbook has tracked. Its 70 transactions clear the previous high of 61, set in February 2026. The 24 acquisitions and mergers are also a single-month high (the prior mark was 22, in March 2021), and the $2.43B in disclosed funding was the most in any month since February 2022, roughly 80% above the $1.34B raised in September 2025.
Ten of the 24 acquisitions and mergers involved security services firms, the companies that run testing, compliance, and monitoring work for customers, a sign that the services side of the market is consolidating. A-LIGN bought Pathfynder and AssurePoint, CyberMaxx acquired Avertium, and NetSPI merged with Synack. Product vendors were buying too: Omada bought EmpowerID in identity governance, and Jamf bought browser-security vendor Keep Aware.
Six funding rounds reached $100M or more: Cyera ($400M), Island ($400M), Upwind ($300M), Exein ($270M), Cylake ($245M), and HiddenLayer ($100M). The five largest account for about two-thirds of the month's disclosed capital, while 28 of the 46 rounds were Seed or Series A. AI security drew a meaningful share, with Cylake and HiddenLayer joined by a $50M seed round for AIR, $30M for Lasso Security, and Upwind's purchase of Aegis. Identity matched services for the most transactions of any segment at 11, mostly early rounds, and fraud prevention added six rounds of its own.
Stage and segment breakdown
| Stage | Count |
|---|---|
| Acquisition | 23 |
| Merger | 1 |
| Seed | 17 |
| Series A | 11 |
| Series B | 5 |
| Series C | 1 |
| Series D+ | 2 |
| Top segments | Transactions |
|---|---|
| Security Services | 11 |
| Identity | 11 |
| AI/LLM | 7 |
| Fraud | 6 |
| GRC | 6 |
| Data | 6 |
A note on segments. Cybersecurity is changing quickly, and our segment labels need to keep pace. For deals added since September 23, 2026, we retired several overlapping labels and folded them into broader ones. The most visible change is Human Risk, which replaces Training and Social Engineering and covers vendors focused on the people side of security. Earlier reports and historical data keep their original labels.
Two deals worth your attention
Island — $400M Series F. Island's raise, backed by investors including Evolution Equity Partners, Prysm Capital, and Sequoia Capital, matched Cyera's for the largest round of the month and is the biggest of the five rounds this series has tracked for the company: $115M in 2022, $100M in 2023, $175M in 2024, and $250M in 2025 before this one. Island sells an enterprise browser — a locked-down version of the tool employees already use, with security and data controls built in — and its growing rounds have made browser security an established late-stage category. September also brought $40M for consumer browser-security vendor Guardio and Jamf's acquisition of Keep Aware, a sign that the browser is drawing attention from both investors and acquirers.
Upwind — $300M Series C, plus the acquisition of Aegis. Upwind, which secures cloud environments, raised a $300M Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and bought AI-security startup Aegis in the same month. The round follows a $250M raise in January 2026, and the company's path through this series runs from a $28M seed in 2022 to $50M in 2023 and $100M in 2024. Socure did the same in August, raising and buying in the same month; Upwind's choice of target points to where cloud security is heading: protecting the AI workloads that now run inside those environments.
Companies we've covered before
Cyera. Cyera's $400M this month, from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, extends the round it raised in June. It extends a long run of rounds in the series — $60M in 2022, $100M in 2023, two $300M rounds in 2024, $500M and $400M in 2025, $600M in June 2026 — and follows its $1B acquisition of Oasis Security in July.
Cylake. Cylake opened with a $45M seed round in March 2026 and returns six months later with $245M from a group including Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the faster step-ups in the AI-security cohort.
HiddenLayer. HiddenLayer has climbed steadily through this series since 2022 — a $6M seed, a $50M Series A in 2023, and now a $100M Series B — as securing AI models has shifted from a niche concern to a funded category.
The other 68 transactions are in the data feed. 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 roughly 2,800 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 is adjusted as the market changes. 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.