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The Black Hat Startup Spotlight is back for Black Hat USA 2024! This Black Hat special event is a video pitch competition for cybersecurity startup companies to present their products and solutions in front of a live audience at Black Hat USA.
Black Hat USA 2024 Startup Spotlight Winner
Special congratulations to Knostic, Black Hat's 2024 Startup Spotlight Competition Winner!
Read more about the onsite pitch competition experience.
Create and submit your 5-minute video using the Form below, calling out your company’s competitive advantages of the product or solution and how it will help cybersecurity pros. Products and solutions can be in development, about to launch or in the recently launched phases.
Finalists Receive
One Turnkey Startup booth at Black Hat USA 2024
One 20-minute speaking session in the Startup City Theater
One 30-minute call with an Omdia Cybersecurity Analyst
Key Dates
April 17: Competition Opens
June 12: Competition Closes and Submissions Due
July 8: Finalists Announced
August 6: Finalists Present during Black Hat's Innovators & Investors Summit, Winner Announced
August 7-8: Finalists Exhibit at Black Hat USA
Who Can Enter
Any Startup company 5 years old or less with less than 50 employees is eligible to enter the competition.
Note: It is not necessary to be an Exhibitor at Black Hat USA 2024 to enter the competition. There are no entry fees.
LEARN MORE about promoting your company as an Exhibitor at Black Hat USA 2024
Judges
The four finalists are invited to exhibit in the Startup City area at Black Hat USA 2024 and present their product or solution live to the judging panel and live audience where a winner will be announced.
Ketaki Borade supports Omdia’s Infrastructure Security research practice. She is responsible for qualitative and quantitative analysis of key vendors in the service. She provides insights into technology, market trends, and competitive landscape.
Ketaki brings her eight years of experience in consulting and syndicate research to this role. Ketaki has researched the semiconductor market for three years with MarketsandMarkets. Prior to joining Omdia, she worked with Canalys for five years as a cybersecurity analyst. She was leading the North American security practice for endpoint security, network security, email and web security, and vulnerability management with channels insights. Ketaki has a bachelor's degree in electronics and telecommunications and a master’s degree in operations.
Coleen Coolidge is a recovering CISO who is currently helping small startups ~her favorite~ go from 0→1. This includes but is not limited to: helping with a security-product roadmap that CISOs want; helping founders through the pitfalls of also being executives, helping founders establish themselves in the Security Community, and sometimes pulling from her 19 years in the industry to help small Security teams get traction in an adversarial work environment.
Previously, Coleen was the CISO at Twilio, but was also the CISO at Segment in San Francisco. She built the org and practice from the ground up, and from Segment Security emerged an entire class of sought-after leaders, security engineers, GRC practitioners, and IT professionals.
Trey Ford is a strategic advisor and thought partner to business leaders, investors, and corporate directors. With over twenty-five years in technology leadership and execution, he has built, broken, troubleshot, and rebooted ... a lot of stuff.
Previous roles Trey held include CISO at Deepwatch, Executive Director of Cyber Security and Deputy CISO at Vista Equity Partners, Chief Information Security Officer and Head of Trust for Heroku at Salesforce, General Manager of Black Hat, and has held strategic advisory and global consulting roles... he still apologizes for time served as an auditor.
Hollie Hennessy provides insight into the fascinating and fast-moving domain of IoT cybersecurity.
Hollie has a range of experience in research. She began her career in the legal sector, writing and researching for expert witness reports on the labor market. She then moved into product testing, with a consumer protection focus. In this role, she was responsible for managing comparative tests of various technology products, as well as regular testing and investigative work into the security of these products.
She has published articles in Which?, one of the UK's largest subscription magazines, produced by the country's largest consumer organization; and Computing magazine.
Maria Markstedter is the founder and CEO of Azeria Labs, offering services and training courses to large tech companies and law enforcement agencies. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Corporate Security and a Master’s degree in Enterprise Security, and served as the Chief Product Officer for the Arm virtualization startup Corellium. In 2018, Maria became a Forbes “30 under 30” list member for technology, has been featured in Vogue Business Magazine, and was named the Forbes Person of the Year in Cybersecurity 2020. She is recognized for her expertise in Arm reverse engineering and binary exploitation and worked on exploit mitigation research alongside Arm in Cambridge. She continues to educate security researchers and developers around the world on attacking and defending Arm binary applications and is the author of the book Arm Assembly Internals and Reverse Engineering (TBP 2022, Wiley). Maria is a member of both the Black Hat® EU and US Trainings and Briefings Review Board.
Lucas is a Partner at Lytical Ventures and member of its investment committee where he oversees day-to-day fund operations. This includes deal sourcing, technical diligence, and deal structuring. Lucas is also responsible for working with the companies in the investment portfolio (including any board responsibilities), as well as managing relationships with limited partners, the venture ecosystem and the back office.
Prior to joining Lytical Ventures, Lucas was a Principal at Evolution Equity and a Principal at Gotham Ventures. Lucas was also a Venture Partner at Antecedent Ventures. Lucas was a Sr. Manager of Secure Software Engineering at Adobe and a pen tester at @Stake. Lucas holds an MBA from Dartmouth and a BS in computer science from Purdue University. He is also a Kauffman Fellow.
Robert Stratton is a security strategist, technologist, venture capitalist and business advisor. He has had a hand in bringing some of the earliest security products to market in several categories including VPNs and network intrusion detection and established one of the first dedicated security organizations within a tier-1 Internet service provider at UUNET.
He was a founding General Partner of the Mach37 Cyber Accelerator, and the first Director of Technology assessment at In-Q-Tel, a private venture capital firm investing for the benefit of the U.S. Intelligence Community.
Robert served as Chief Strategy & Security Officer at Witopia, and Director of Government Research at Symantec Research Labs. As a co-founder and Chief Technologist of Security Design International, he was doing multinational and critical infrastructure security architectures, penetration testing, digital forensics, and incident response before they were cool.
Robert is a Member of the IEEE, the ISSA, the IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Working Group P7014, developing a Standard for Ethical Considerations in Emulated Empathy in Autonomous and Intelligent Systems.
Rik Turner is a principal analyst in Omdia's IT security and technology team, specializing in cybersecurity technology trends, IT security, compliance, and call recording. Rik provides analysis and insights on market evolution and helps end users determine what type of technology and which vendor they should pursue.
Rik has also worked in Omdia's financial services technology team, with a specialization in capital markets technology. Prior to joining Informa (now Omdia), he worked as an IT journalist, specializing in networking and security. He was also a foreign correspondent in Brazil, where he worked, among others, for the Financial Times and The Economist.
Hosted by
Kelly Jackson-Higgins
Editor-in-Chief, Dark Reading
Kelly Jackson Higgins is the Editor-in-Chief of Dark Reading. She is an award-winning veteran technology and business journalist with more than two decades of experience in reporting and editing for various publications, including Network Computing, Secure Enterprise Magazine, Virginia Business magazine, and other major media properties. Jackson Higgins was recently selected as one of the Top 10 Cybersecurity Journalists in the US, and named as one of Folio's 2019 Top Women in Media. She began her career as a sports writer in the Washington, DC metropolitan area, and earned her BA at William & Mary. Follow her on Twitter @kjhiggins.