Decibel Partners

You really can't bet against gravity - the funds have to flow! #gravity #funds #flow https://lnkd.in/eYjdrhAN

Biggest security acquisition?ever ?? .?But here’s the question:?does this actually make cloud security better, or just deepen vendor lock-in? Google’s $32B purchase of Wiz is a wake-up call. Cloud security isn’t just a feature anymore—it’s?the?battleground. But security isn’t something you buy.?It’s something you do. ?? If your security strategy depends on a single vendor, you’ve already lost control. ?? Multi-cloud security doesn’t work when you’re locked into a walled garden. ?? Real security is open, adaptable, and built for?practitioners—not procurement teams. We break it all down in our latest blog:?Google Bought Wiz for $32B. Now What? https://lnkd.in/dzybptTn And speaking of?real security conversations—we want?your?voice in the mix. ??? Call for Papers is open for the Open Cloud Security Conference on April 8! ?If you’re pushing the boundaries in cloud security—whether it’s open-source tools, cloud pentesting, or threat detection—we want to hear from you. No vendor fluff, just?real-world security insights. ??? CFP closes?March 20?→ [Submit your talk now!] https://lnkd.in/dT46rmuE Let’s build?the future of open cloud security—together.??? #CloudSecurity #OpenCloudSecurity #Multicloud #VendorLockIn #Wiz #Google #Security

We are excited to announce that Patrick Gray founder of Risky Business Media, is joining Decibel as a Founder Advisor. Pat is a well known cybersecurity analyst whose podcasts are downloaded >200k times a month. Risky Business is widely regarded as the #1 show for founders, security researchers, and technical CISOs who want an unfiltered and trusted perspective that cuts through the noise in the cyber industry. Pat has been a friend to many Decibel founders through the years, and he shares our passion for helping startups at the earliest stage. In his Founder Advisor role he’ll be helping founders accelerate their adoption among the most respected security practitioners, and will extend our network and reach to an even larger audience of early adopters around the world. Together we’ll also be investing in new startups and will collaborate to incubate and seed new opportunities at the intersection of AI, Cyber, and Defense. This type of partnership is unique in the VC industry and we are excited to share more about it in our Founder Q&A below. Welcome Pat!

Last week, we were excited to co-host our first National Cyber Innovation Summit in Washington D.C. alongside our partner J.P. Morgan, bringing together the most forward thinking security founders, researchers and customers in the private and public sector. I was thrilled to have had the chance to moderate the panel of "Man vs. Machine - How Attackers and Defenders are utilizing AI in security" with Will Pearce (Dreadnode), Michael Brown (Strider Technologies) and David McGuire (SpecterOps). Big thank you to all who came out and joined in on this lively and very important discussion! As always, if you are interested in attending the next one, please let us know!

Thanks to all who attended the first National Cyber Innovation Summit co-hosted with our friends from J.P. Morgan! We brought together a great group of cybersecurity founders and modern security leaders from Fortune 500 enterprises & government agencies to discuss the next evolution of cyber defenses which we call programmable and autonomous defense. ? Thanks to the Decibel family of panelists and participants including Anthony Grieco, Ian Thiel, Josh Kamdjou, Colin Jones, Oliver Friedrichs, Devon Rollins, David McGuire, Will Pearce, Zakir Durumeric, Fletcher Heisler and Brad Palm. Our Decibel After Dark: Dinner and Unfiltered Conversations was a highlight! Great connections were made and conversations were started (some of which continued through the Blood Moon/lunar eclipse late into the evening!) ?? Fabulous dinner friends included: Sara Lazarus, Katie Gray, Jéssica Le?o, Scott Bachand, David Dubick, Jonathan Mortensen, Damien Lewke, Myke Lyons, Rajiv Taori, and Ian R.. Next stop RSAC, please reach out if you can join us at our Decibel Oasis! ??

We were thrilled to co-host our first National Cyber Innovation Summit this week with our partners at J.P. Morgan in Washington, DC. Many of our portfolio companies were founded by security researchers from the DC community and continue to collaborate closely with the U.S. government to advance cyber defense and intelligence capabilities. These public-private partnerships are essential for keeping our country competitive in a rapidly evolving field, particularly as AI adoption accelerates around the world. A special “Thank You” to the founders and industry leaders who came together to discuss what’s possible when we work together to push the frontier: ***How Can We Build an Autonomous and Programmable Defense?*** Pat Opet (CISO of JP Morgan) Anthony Grieco (CSO of Cisco) Zakir Durumeric (Founder of Censys) Josh Kamdjou (Founder of Sublime Security) ***Man vs. Machine: What’s Possible with AI?*** Michael Brown (Founder of Strider) David McGuire (Founder of SpecterOps) Will Pearce (Founder of Dreadnode) ***Masters of Scale: M&A in a Rapidly Advancing Market*** Oliver Friedrichs (Founder of Pangea) JC Raby (MD, JP Morgan) Gur Talpaz (former VP of Corp Dev, Crowdstrike) ***How to Partner with the US Government*** Steve Bowsher (CEO of In-Q-Tel) Rob Joyce (former Director of Cybersecurity, NSA) Tom McAndrew (CEO of Coalfire) Thank you to John China and the entire JP Morgan team (Pat Callaghan, Dan Hardman, Katheryn Rosen, Pavel Yefanau) and our Decibel friends and family for joining us (David Dubick, Katie Gray, Fletcher Heisler, Colin Jones. Damien Lewke, Myke Lyons, Brad Palm, Ian R., Devon Rollins, Rajiv Taori, Ian Thiel, Dan Nguyen-Huu, Jéssica Le?o, Stacey Wueste). We will definitely hold another summit next year and look forward to seeing you all at the RSA conference next month!

Welcome to the Age of the Agent Wars ??—Who will be AI’s next top model? OpenAI, Gemini, and Manus are heating up the battle for AI’s app layer. Here’s what caught my attention this week: ◆ OpenAI launched its new Agents Platform (Responses API & Agents SDK). Simplifying AI development or tightening ecosystem lock-in? You decide. ◇ Google’s Gemma 3 delivers powerful multimodal performance optimized for minimal hardware—perfect for startups wary of rising AI costs. ◆ China’s Manus exploded onto the scene as a serious challenger to Operator and others. Is this the next DeepSeek moment? ???? ◇ Meta is testing custom AI chips, signaling big tech’s push against NVIDIA dependence. The hardware wars are real. Market chaos aside, the AI app-layer race is on—and it’s anyone’s game. ?? ???? Full blog link in comments.

?? What does AI have in common with The White Lotus? This week felt like that unsettling scene—?? a calm before the AI tsunami hits. Beneath the surface, momentum is gathering force: ???Rumors swirl about OpenAI's tiered AI agents, with prices that could reshape enterprise AI ($2K–$20K/month!). ???MCP (Model-Context Protocol) is suddenly everywhere, described as "a USB-C port for AI apps." ???AWS makes moves, stepping into AI agents with a new hybrid reasoning model. ???Alibaba's open-source model, QWQ-32B, sets a new benchmark, outperforming DeepSeek. ?? Dive deeper in this week's blog, I’d love your thoughts! (link in comments)

In honor of #WomensHistoryMonth, we got the gals together! Such a fun lunch at Cotogna joined by founders and technical leaders from Character.AI, Decagon, Writer, Credo AI, Google DeepMind, Descript and many more. We wrote down the names of women who have inspired us or helped lift us up in the workplace. Even Beyoncé made the list?? Comment a few women that helped you in your career or that you would like to nominate for our next #WinAi event.

Big news from the SpecterOps team! We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve raised a Series B investment to further our mission of tackling Identity Attack Paths and strengthening enterprise security. With this backing, we’ll be expanding our BloodHound platform, growing our research and engineering teams, and continuing to support the cybersecurity community through open-source contributions. Identity security is more critical than ever as organizations navigate increasingly complex environments. Attack Path Management is the future, and we’re just getting started. A huge thank you to our partners, customers, and the entire community for supporting us on this journey! Read more about what’s next for SpecterOps: https://lnkd.in/gpe2FPhg