US-based cybersecurity industry analyst firm IT-Harvest has announced the second cohort of its Cyber 150 awards – and 22% of winners are offering AI security products.

Cyber 150 is IT-Harvest’s annual list of the fastest-growing mid-size cybersecurity companies worldwide.

Introduced in January 2025, this prize awards emerging security vendors that are scaling rapidly and shaping the next generation of cybersecurity technology.

Building from its own data and open access information (e.g. LinkedIn), IT-Harvest selected the top 150 cybersecurity vendors with between 50 and 500 staff members based on a range of metrics, including their total funding, 2025 growth and market traction.

According to IT-Harvest research, the global cybersecurity industry now includes 4000 vendors and 11,000 security products, reflecting the growing importance of digital defense in every sector of the economy.

Richard Stiennon, founder and chief research analyst of IT-Harvest, shared the new cohort on his Substack blog, “The Security Industry,” on March 9.

AI Security Leads the 2026 Cyber 150 Cohort

Out of the top 150 startups selected in the 2026 batch of winners, 33 fall under the ‘AI security’ category.

These include 2025 awardees BlinkOps, Doppel, Oasis Security, Protexxa and Torq, alongside a number of newer entrants.

Among them are 7AI, which has raised $166m and employs 76 people; Adaptive Security, which raised $136m in 2025 and has a headcount of 187; and Noma Security, which has raised $132m – including $100m in 2025 – and employs 105 people.

US-based Tenex.ai, which provides next-generation managed detection and response (MDR) services that combine AI with human expertise to detect and respond to enterprise security threats, ranked as the top growing startup in the 2026 cohort, with a recorded 318% growth over the past year.

Other well represented categories in the 2026 cohort of Cyber 150 nominees include ‘Governance, risk and compliance’ (GRC) with 24 companies selected, ‘Security operations’ (15 companies) ‘Application security’ (13 companies) and ‘Data security’ (13 companies).

New Entrants Dominate as Eight Companies “Graduate”

The 2026 cohort showed a strong influx of new companies, with 103 new entrants among the selected top 150.

The remaining 47 had already been listed in the 2025 cohort. Their presence in 2026 means they kept a positive growth but had not grown past 500 employees.

Eight 2025 winners “graduated” by exceeding the 500‑employee mark: Chainguard, Coralogix, Cyera, Group‑IB, miniOrange, Persona, Silverfort and Tines.

While the 2026 winners spanned across 19 countries, some regions of the world dominated, with 89 nominees based in the US, 27 in Israel, 16 in the EU and 14 in non-US Five Eyes countries (Canada, Australia and the UK).

Upwind, a US-based security operations startup, ranked as the company that raised the most ($430m) in total, while Exein, an Italian internet-of-things (IoT) security firm, was the one on the list that raised the most in 2025 alone ($189.94m).

In a public statement, Stiennon said that Cyber 150 can help “identify the companies that are emerging as the next leaders of cybersecurity.”