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The Startup Spotlight Competition returns for year four at Black Hat USA! This Black Hat special event is a video pitch competition for cybersecurity startup companies to win a chance to exhibit and present their products and solutions in front of a live audience.
About The Competition
Win your way to exhibit at Black Hat USA!
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 2025
One 20-minute speaking session in the Startup City Theater
One 30-minute call with an Omdia Cybersecurity Analyst
Key Dates
April 16: Competition Opens
June 11: Competition Closes and Submissions Due
July 7: Finalists Announced
August 5: Finalists Present during Black Hat's Innovators & Investors Summit, Winner Announced
August 6-7: 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 2025 to enter the competition. There are no entry fees.
LEARN MORE about promoting your company as an Exhibitor at Black Hat USA 2025
Judges
The four finalists are invited to exhibit in the Startup City area at Black Hat USA 2025 and present their product or solution live to the judging panel and live audience where a winner will be announced.
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 seasoned strategic advisor and security thought leader with over 25 years of experience in offensive and defensive disciplines (incident response, application, network, cloud, and platform security). Trey has held key leadership roles at Deepwatch, Vista Equity Partners, Salesforce, Black Hat, and more. He has also been a valued member of Bugcrowd's advisory board for over a decade.
Trey is passionate about working with enterprise leaders, corporate directors, and investors to help teams strengthen their technology and execution strategy. He believes in a hands-on approach to building, breaking, and deconstructing security problems.
Trey has a Master of Science from the University of Texas at Austin and executive education at Harvard Business School. Hailing from Austin, he is a husband, father, and shares his passion for aviation as an instrument rated private pilot.
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.
Brooke Motta is the co-founder and CEO of Rad Security, renowned for its top-ranked Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) platform. Brooke has an impressive track record with 20 years in the cybersecurity industry, previously holding leadership roles at companies like Sonatype, Bugcrowd and Rapid7. She is not only a visionary leader but also actively contributes to the community as a mentor with EWF and a coach for Girls on the Run, reflecting her commitment to promoting fairness and diversity in technology.
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.
Sid Trivedi is a Partner at Foundation Capital where he leads early-stage investments in cybersecurity and IT. His investments include Stacklet, AirMDR, PrimeSec, DevZero, Pulse Security AI, Permiso, Neurelo, Levo, Phenom, Attivo Networks (acq. SentinelOne), CloudKnox (acq. Microsoft), Respond Software (acq. Mandiant), and MistNet (acq. LogRhythm). Prior to Foundation, Sid was an investor at Omidyar Technology Ventures and Symphony Technology Group. He is also a co-founder of CyberSeed, a community of over 1,000 cybersecurity founders, and co-founder and co-host of the Inside the Network podcast, which shares how category-defining cybersecurity startups are built. Outside of work, Sid serves on the advisory boards of Entrepreneurship at Cornell, the California Israel Chamber of Commerce, and Cornell Venture Capital. Sid graduated Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude from Cornell University.
Mikala Vidal is a seasoned go-to-market executive and startup advisor with a proven track record of driving growth for cybersecurity companies. She helps companies identify revenue opportunities, implement transformational strategies and empower teams to meet strategic business goals.
Mikala is currently the head of growth for Lineaje, a software supply chain security company. She was previously the chief revenue officer at Phylum (acquired by Veracode), which won the first Black Hat Startup Spotlight Competition, and is an Advisor for Mobb, which won the second Black Hat Startup Spotlight Competition. She has also held leadership roles at Intralinks, Uplevel Security (acquired by McAfee), Allure Security, HCL Software and TruSTAR (acquired by Splunk).