Cybersecurity’s new race: Finding the CrowdStrike or Wiz of AI security

The race to become the next CrowdStrike or Wiz in AI security is playing out this week at the RSAC Conference, the cybersecurity industry’s largest gathering.

Why it matters: A wave of AI-native upstarts in the cybersecurity space is piling pressure on incumbents to adapt through acquisitions and by building new capabilities

• “These vendors are very aware now that they need to adapt because if they don’t, these smaller, AI-native companies have a very unique window where they can really penetrate the market,” Dimitri Zabelin, a senior investment research analyst at PitchBook, told Axios.

The big picture: Wiz and CrowdStrike became breakout cybersecurity players by quickly owning emerging technology shifts — cloud for Wiz and endpoint detection for CrowdStrike.

• Now, cybersecurity CEOs say they’re feeling pressure to keep up and are arriving at RSAC looking for acquisition targets and ideas to build internally.

Driving the news: Customers will spend the week at RSAC comparing notes on which vendors are best at defending against the AI-driven threats they’re already facing, Hugh Thompson, executive chairman of RSAC, told Axios.

• “You’re going to see a lot of these companies have to respond at a speed that they really haven’t had [to before],” he added.

Threat level: Legacy vendors and emerging startups are up against a fast-changing landscape.

• Some customers are building AI-powered security operations centers in-house instead of outsourcing to vendors.
• Others are shifting portions of their cybersecurity spending to smaller, AI-focused vendors.
• At the same time, Anthropic and OpenAI are exploring agentic cybersecurity products built on top of their existing code security platforms.

By the numbers: In the last quarter of 2025, deals involving security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) — or tools that identify and respond to threats like phishing and data exfiltration — grew 76.5%, according to PitchBook.

• In 2025, half of all cybersecurity deals involved AI-native startups, per PitchBook.

Zoom in: Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha told Axios the cybersecurity market “as we know it is dead.” The most successful vendors will be those that reimagine their products as AI-native, not just AI-enhanced, he said.

• Earlier this year, Rubrik made its Agent Cloud generally available, offering tools to manage and control AI agents on systems.
• “If the company has culture of change, adaptability, innovation — that’s the company that will survive,” Sinha said.

Reality check: While some legacy vendors are adapting, others are failing to grasp the shift, including its implications for the workforce, analysts told Axios.

• “There is still a lot of head in the sand for the reality of the situation and a lot of marketing as well,” Jeff Pollard, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told Axios.
• Many large companies are unlikely to quickly abandon long-standing security vendors in favor of early-stage AI startups.

What to watch: The list of winners from RSAC’s Innovation Sandbox, the conference’s flagship startup pitch competition, as a signal for where market demand is heading.

Go deeper: OpenAI unveils Codex Security to automate code security reviews