Hot topics at this year’s RSA Conference in February will include cloud security, Internet of Things security and encryption — and all of those issues unsurprisingly are represented among the 10 finalists announced for the event’s annual Innovation Sandbox Contest for startups.
I ran the company descriptions provided in the RSA Conference press release about the contest through a Wordcloud generator and produced the spectacular graphic above that put “data” protection at the heart of what these newcomers are addressing. The biggest shock for me was that machine learning didn’t get mentioned in each description…but it did make the cut in three of the 10.
In all, 87 companies applied for the contest.
A few of the names on the Innovation Sandbox finalists, list are familiar — we’ve written about former Check Point CEO Shlomo Kramer’s Cato Networks and its cloud-based network security offerings more than once, and the same goes for Veriflow, which verifies network infrastructure changes to avoid vulnerabilities that could lead to outages or intrusions. But most companies on the list are fresh faces, perhaps only vaguely familiar from having announced early funding rounds.
The winner of the contest could well become much better known after Feb. 13, the date on which the companies will demonstrate their ideas and get judged. Past winners have included the likes of Sourcefire and Imperva, as well as 2017 victor Phantom, which just snagged $13.5M in…