Five cybersecurity startups will pitch live on stage at Infosecurity Europe 2026 on Tuesday 2 June, each competing for a prize package that includes a free exhibition stand at Infosecurity Europe 2027, PR support and a brand workshop.
The competition and the Cyber Startups Zone
New for 2026, the Infosecurity Europe Cyber Startup competition will be accompanied by a dedicated area on the show floor, the Cyber Startups Zone. The competition itself takes place on Tuesday 2 June and will see the five selected finalists each pitch their ideas live on stage to an audience of senior industry leaders, investors and buyers.
The judging panel: Shlomo Kramer, Mun Valiji and Kirsty Kelly
The finalists will present to a three-member judging panel. Shlomo Kramer — described in the event material as “one of the most influential figures in the global cyber industry” and a founder and investor in companies including Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Imperva, Cato Networks and Sumo Logic — brings investor and founder experience to the assessment. He will be joined by Mun Valiji, group CISO at specialist banking group Close Brothers, and Kirsty Kelly, Group CISO at CFC insurance provider Underwriting.
The prize package on offer
The winner of the Cyber Startup competition will receive a bundled prize package. According to the event announcement, the package includes a free exhibition stand at Infosecurity Europe 2027, PR support from cyber security PR agency Origin Communications, and a future-brand workshop package from Dusted brand consultancy.
The five finalists: what each company says it does
- Cytidel — Described as a vulnerability intelligence platform, Cytidel provides “a real-time intelligence layer between security tooling and decision-making,” showing organizations which vulnerabilities matter, which threat actors are driving risk, and where to act first. The platform aims to move security teams from reactive vulnerability management to “intelligence-led risk decisions,” reduce noise, improve resource allocation and prepare organizations for a fast-moving threat landscape. Cytidel is headquartered in Castlebar, Mayo, Ireland and was founded in 2022.
- Datambit Limited — Datambit specialises in advanced deepfake detection for audio and video with a stated mission “to restore trust in digital evidence online.” The company’s platform aims to determine whether audio or video has been synthetically generated or manipulated, delivering “high-confidence, explainable outputs suitable for investigative, legal and operational decision-making.” Datambit was founded in 2023 and is headquartered in London.
- Konvu — Marketed as an AI-native vulnerability triage platform that automates investigation, Konvu connects to the scanners enterprises already use, runs agent-driven checks across code, configuration and optional runtime signals, and returns evidence-backed exploitability decisions into existing workflows. The company frames its product as a response to attackers “weaponizing issues and probing complex environments faster than ever,” and says the core bottleneck is no longer finding vulnerabilities but investigating them quickly enough to produce defensible decisions. Konvu was founded in 2024 and is headquartered in New York, USA.
- Ploy — Ploy presents itself as an agentic access intelligence platform offering visibility and autonomous control over access across SaaS applications, cloud, identity providers and collaboration tools. The company cites industry figures in its description — stating identity-related attacks are responsible for 80% of breaches and that 93% of organisations suffer multiple identity incidents every year — and positions its autonomous identity management platform as designed to solve that problem. Ploy was founded in 2023 by Jacob Prime (CEO) and Harry Lucas (CTO) and is headquartered in London.
- Red Carbon — Red Carbon offers what it calls a workforce of six AI Analysts to help Security Operations Centres manage alerts and false positives. The platform performs automated low-level analysis to reduce alert fatigue and provides threat intelligence analysis, compliance analysis, auditing analysis and related functions. Described as a native AI solution for IT security, Red Carbon says it is designed to improve operational efficiency and optimise the skills of security professionals. The company was founded in 2020 and is headquartered in Torino, Italy.
How security operations, buyers and insurers will watch the competition
Security operations teams and SOC managers will likely be watching product claims that directly target operational bottlenecks: Cytidel and Konvu emphasise faster, intelligence-led vulnerability decisioning; Red Carbon pitches AI analysts to reduce alert fatigue. Buyers and investors in the audience will be assessing commercial fit and readiness for deployment, as the competition’s live-pitch format puts product-market claims under scrutiny from senior industry leaders, investors and buyers. Insurers and risk managers — represented on the judging panel by Kirsty Kelly of CFC — may focus on offerings that quantify risk reduction and support compliance or incident response, such as Datambit’s explainable deepfake attribution for digital evidence or Ploy’s autonomous controls for identity-related exposure.
On 2 June the five finalists will make their case to the judges and a crowd of industry stakeholders; the winner will be awarded the package that includes a guaranteed spot on the Infosecurity Europe floor in 2027 plus PR and branding support. Which approach — vulnerability intelligence, deepfake detection, automated triage, autonomous identity control, or AI-driven SOC assistance — convinces the panel and the market will be revealed on stage at the event.
Original story: https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/infosec-europe-cyber-startup/
