All analysis was generated autonomously, without human review. Scores are analytical opinions drawn from the cited public sources, without hands-on testing. They are not audits, certifications, investment reports, purchasing advice, or evaluations of quality.
Circumvent sells cloud and security teams an AI system that triages the findings their security scanners produce. Its agents check each finding against the customer’s applications and code, then mark it a false positive, an accepted risk, or a fix for the code’s owner. SmartCompany dates Circumvent’s founding to 2024. It raised a US$6 million seed round from Paladin Capital Group. When it raised that round, Circumvent said it was working with enterprises in the US, Australia and New Zealand. Co-founder Michael Watts founded Cloud Conformity, a cloud security company Trend Micro acquired in 2019. Circumvent lists its agent that drafts fixes as coming soon. Security vendors whose findings it imports, such as Wiz and Orca Security, could add the same checks to their own products.
| Description | Circumvent is a cloud security company whose AI agents check findings from cloud and code scanners against each customer's applications and owners, then send verified issues to the engineers who own them. | [f1] |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 2024 | [f2] |
| HQ | Sydney, Australia and San Francisco, US | [f3] |
| Funding | $6M total | [f4] |
| Latest funding | Seed | [f4] |
| Product | What it does |
|---|---|
| Circumvent | A platform whose AI agents investigate cloud and code security findings against application context and route verified work to the owning engineers. |
Cyber Defense Matrix
| Identify | Protect | Detect | Respond | Recover | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Devices Workstations, servers, phones, tablets, storage, network devices, IoT infrastructure, and similar hardware. | |||||
| Applications Software, interactions, and application flows on the devices. | |||||
| Networks Connections and traffic flowing among devices and apps, plus communication paths. | |||||
| Data Content at rest, in transit, or in use across devices, apps, and networks. | |||||
| Users The people using the devices, apps, networks, and data. |
Circumvent uses AI agents to correlate and investigate security findings across cloud applications, data, and infrastructure and to route remediation to owners, so it defends conventional cloud assets and is mapped to the Cyber Defense Matrix. [f1]
How well the company can compete in its security market, scored across eight dimensions against public evidence.
| Dimension | Score | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Problem Clarity How precisely the company defines its problem, with evidence the problem exists at the scale claimed. | 3/5 | Circumvent names a specific buyer, organizations whose scanner findings must reach many application owners, and a specific pain, unverified findings that consume engineering time. The company and its founders state the scale of that pain themselves. The cited sources contain no independent measurement of that pain. [s1, s6, s7, s12] |
| Capability Depth How specific the technical capabilities are, with evidence beyond marketing claims such as docs and third-party validation. | 3/5 | Circumvent’s own pages describe concrete mechanics, including OCSF normalization, an application and service map, reachability and exploitable-function checks, and a tamper-evident decision log. Its sitemap lists no product documentation, no third-party evaluation of the agents appears in the cited sources, and the remediation agent is listed as coming soon, so the depth is described. [s1, s3, s4, s6, s18] |
| Market Timing Whether the market is ready for this product, with evidence that buyers are actively seeking solutions. | 3/5 | Watts argued in July 2026 that cheap detection created the triage backlog and that the AI reasoning needed to triage findings in context now exists, a credible enabler. No independent buyer-side signal such as an analyst category note or budget line appears in the cited sources, so demand is indirect. [s7, s12, s15] |
| Team Credibility Demonstrated domain expertise with public signals such as prior exits, publications, and industry recognition. | 4/5 | Co-founder Michael Watts founded Cloud Conformity, a cloud misconfiguration company Trend Micro acquired in 2019, an in-domain exit that Startup Daily and Paladin document. CTO Thomas Bui adds engineering experience from banking, government, and Uber. [s7, s13, s14, s17] |
| GTM Proof Evidence of actual traction (customers, revenue signals, partnerships) beyond stated intentions. | 3/5 | Circumvent sells the Circumvent Enterprise Platform through a private-offer AWS Marketplace listing. Circumvent reports enterprise work in the US, Australia, and New Zealand and pilot results. No independent corroboration of scale appears in the cited sources. [s3, s11, s12, s15] |
| Funding Efficiency Whether funding matches go-to-market ambition, with signs of capital-efficient growth. | 3/5 | Circumvent raised a US$6 million seed round from Paladin Capital Group in June 2025, proportional to a seed-stage company building a product for enterprise buyers. It has since shipped three live agents, a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation, and a Marketplace listing. No revenue or growth figure for Circumvent appears in the cited sources. [s2, s3, s11, s12, s14] |
| Category Clarity Whether the company creates or fits a recognizable category that buyers can quickly place in their stack. | 3/5 | Circumvent describes its product as validation of cloud and application security findings, a recognizable slot beside the scanners it integrates with. Watts wrote that an early question he almost always hears is whether Circumvent is a CNAPP, a SIEM, or exposure management, so placement still needs the company’s explanation. [s1, s8] |
| Incumbent Defensibility How vulnerable the core value proposition is to absorption as a feature by a platform vendor. | 3/5 | Circumvent maps services to applications with explicit ownership, surfaces repeated findings so the same issues are not escalated again, and keeps remediation state coherent across tickets, chats and pipelines. A replacement would have to rebuild that customer context and workflow coordination, which is some friction to absorption. These are Circumvent's own descriptions, its reasoning log is exportable, and no source shows a structural moat that bundling could not replicate, so the score is 3. [s6, s4, s5, s3] |
Circumvent targets the backlog of findings that cloud and application security scanners hand to engineering teams. Its platform investigates each finding against the customer’s own applications, services, and owners, then returns a verdict with evidence so that only verified work reaches an owner. The intended buyers are organizations with many applications, shared platform services, and ownership split between security and engineering.
Michael Watts, a co-founder, frames the problem as a side effect of cheap detection. In a July 2026 post he described Cloud Conformity, his earlier company, as a detection company that checked cloud environments against more than a thousand best practices. He argued that the AI reasoning needed to triage findings in context did not exist a decade ago.
Circumvent and its founders state the scale of the problem themselves. The company’s homepage claims a 95% reduction in security noise. No independent measurement of the triage gap appears in the cited sources. [s1, s6, s7, s12]
Circumvent’s product ingests findings from cloud and code scanners, normalizes them to the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), and groups duplicates into one list. It also scans cloud and code to build a living map of business Applications and technical Services, with attributes such as criticality, data confidentiality, and ownership.
CIRA, Circumvent’s team of investigation and remediation agents, checks reachability, attack paths, and whether a vulnerable library function is actually called. It then posts a verdict of false positive, risk accepted, or a remediation routed to the code owner. Circumvent says every step CIRA takes is appended to a tamper-evident log.
The agent roster on Circumvent’s site lists the triage, context, and correlation agents as live and the remediation agent, which drafts fixes and routes pull requests, as coming soon. Circumvent’s sitemap lists no product documentation. No third-party technical evaluation of the agents appears in the cited sources. [s1, s3, s4, s6, s18]
Circumvent works on top of the scanners a customer already runs. Its integration list names Wiz, Snyk, Prowler, Orca Security, Tenable, and CrowdStrike among the products it pulls data from, alongside GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and Slack.
The security vendors on that list already produce the findings Circumvent investigates, so any of them could add agent-led validation to its own product. Circumvent positions its product as investigation across all of a customer’s tools, mapped to the customer’s applications and owners.
Watts wrote in an August 2026 post that an early question he almost always hears about Circumvent is whether it is a CNAPP, a SIEM, or exposure management. Buyers who budget by those categories may need to clarify where Circumvent fits. [s1, s4, s8]
Circumvent sells through forms on its site and a private-offer listing on AWS Marketplace. The site routes buyers to request-access and demo forms. The Marketplace listing shows a 12-month cost of $100,000 for the Circumvent Enterprise Platform, which it describes as onboarding a customer’s cloud providers and security tools.
The company’s customer evidence is its own account. At the June 2025 seed round, SecurityWeek and SecurityBrief Australia relayed the company’s statement that it was working with enterprises in the US, Australia, and New Zealand across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Circumvent names none of them, and its agents page reports 90-day pilot results without naming the pilot customer.
Paladin Capital Group, which backed Watts’s earlier company, funded the seed round. That repeat backing is an indirect signal about the team, separate from evidence of customer demand. [s1, s3, s9, s11, s12, s13, s15]
Michael Watts founded Cloud Conformity, which Trend Micro acquired in 2019, and he co-founded Circumvent with Thomas Bui. Infosecurity Magazine reported the acquisition as Trend Micro’s move to tackle cloud misconfigurations. It described Cloud Conformity as giving companies visibility into their AWS and Azure environments, alerts, and remediation priorities. SmartCompany reported that Circumvent was founded in 2024, while Watts wrote in July 2026 that he started it the previous year.
Startup Daily reported the Cloud Conformity sale as a $100m deal, after Paladin backed the company with a US$3.1 million Series A in 2018. Paladin backed Circumvent too, and Watts wrote that the repeat backing removed much of the early friction a new company faces.
Bui is Circumvent’s CTO and previously held roles in banking, government, and at Uber. [s7, s13, s14, s16, s17]
Circumvent holds a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation from the audit firm Sensiba, with a report date of March 31, 2026, covering security, availability, and confidentiality. Its Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type 2 as a roadmap item with preparation in progress, and the Type 1 report is available under a mutual NDA.
Circumvent’s Type 1 report evaluates the design of its controls as of March 31, 2026, and Circumvent says a Type 2 examination would show their operating effectiveness over time. The Trust Center also describes AWS hosting across multiple availability zones, mandatory multi-factor authentication for production access, and a policy that customer data is never used for AI training. [s2, s10]
| Company | Relationship | Note | Compare |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tamnoon | competes with | Competes for the cloud and security engineering teams that triage and remediate cloud security findings. | |
| Wiz | adjacent | Circumvent lists Wiz among the security products it pulls data from, so the two sell to the same cloud security teams. | |
| Orca Security | adjacent | Circumvent lists Orca Security among the security products it pulls data from, so the two sell to the same cloud security teams. |
Add analyzed competitors to compare them side by side with Circumvent.
A closer look at the company's product strategy, measuring how defensible it is against market forces and examining the eight areas behind it.
pivot urgently
Circumvent sells software that a customer’s cloud and security engineers operate. Its SOC 2 Type 1 attestation meets an entry requirement for enterprise sales, with a Type 2 examination still in preparation. The company describes no proprietary dataset or network effect behind its software. Leaving the product would mean rewiring scanner, ticketing, and chat integrations and rebuilding the application and owner map, which is real work that Circumvent has not sized publicly. Security vendors whose findings Circumvent ingests could add agent-led validation to their own products. Co-founder Michael Watts founded the cloud security company Cloud Conformity, which Trend Micro acquired in 2019.
| Dimension | Score | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Value Delivery Does the product sell software as the product, or judgment, trust, or accountability with software as the delivery mechanism. | 1/3 | Circumvent sells software that the customer’s cloud and security team operates and whose outcomes the team owns, with agents that investigate findings and engineers reviewing fixes before merge. Circumvent describes no managed service or accountability for outcomes, which places it at the software-product level. |
| Switching Cost How expensive leaving is for a customer: data portability, integrations, learned workflows, network effects, regulatory data residency. | 2/3 | Leaving Circumvent could require rewiring its scanner, ticketing, and chat integrations and rebuilding the application and owner map, which would require time and effort. This switching burden is inferred from the integrations and application map, and the cited record does not size the migration. |
| Compliance Moat Whether certifications, liability acceptance, or audit trails block an easy replacement. | 1/3 | Circumvent’s SOC 2 Type 1 attestation is an entry requirement a funded competitor can also obtain, and its Type 2 examination is still in preparation. No authorization, mandate, or retained liability tied to the product appears, so compliance does not block a replacement. |
| Problem Complexity Whether the product requires ML, optimization, real-time systems, or years of specialized expertise. | 2/3 | Normalizing findings from many scanners to a common format for security findings, mapping them onto discovered applications and services, and running agents that check reachability and exploitable functions is non-trivial integration with moderate algorithmic depth. Circumvent describes no specialized model training or real-time system that would take years of expertise to reproduce. |
| Buyer Profile Whether buyers are SMB operators, mid-market IT teams, or regulated enterprises and governments with procurement gates. | 2/3 | Circumvent builds and sells for cloud and security teams at organizations with many applications and distributed ownership, an enterprise buyer with IT governance. Its positioning does not single out regulated enterprises or governments, and no buyer in those classes is named. |
| Layer Whether the product is an end-user application, a platform with application features, or infrastructure other applications depend on. | 2/3 | Circumvent is a platform that unifies findings from a customer’s cloud, code, and security tools, maps them onto an application and service graph, and routes work into tickets, channels, and pull requests. It works out of band on findings ingested from those tools, so no application’s requests depend on it to proceed. |
| Proprietary Data, Content, or IP Whether the product accumulates datasets, content licenses, or IP that a rival cannot recreate from scratch. | 1/3 | Circumvent names no retained dataset, licensed content, or granted patent. The application map and decision log it builds describe each customer’s own environment, and no source shows them accumulating to Circumvent across customers. |
Circumvent targets organizations that run many applications on shared cloud platforms, with ownership split between security and engineering teams. Its buyer is the cloud or security engineering team that turns scanner output into owned, prioritized work.
When it announced its seed round in June 2025, the company said it was working with enterprises in the US, Australia, and New Zealand across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Those enterprises are not identified by name in the cited sources. A July 2026 blog post by Erin Howell invited readers to work with the company as design partners.
Circumvent applies AI through a team of agents that investigate security findings. The CIRA agents check exposure, attack paths, and whether a vulnerable library function is actually called. They then post a verdict of false positive, risk accepted, or remediation routed to the owner.
Circumvent publishes its own results for the agents, an 87% rate of findings resolved without human touch in a 90-day pilot and a 95% reduction in security noise. No pilot customer or independent measurement of those figures is identified in the cited sources.
Circumvent describes no dataset that accrues to it across customers. The agents work from each customer’s own application map and attributes. Separately, its Trust Center states that customer data is segmented and never used for AI training. Circumvent’s published materials describe no vendor-retained data asset that a rival building similar agents would have to reproduce.
Circumvent sells through request-access and demo forms on its site and through a private-offer listing on AWS Marketplace. The listing names Circumvent as the seller of the Circumvent Enterprise Platform.
Paladin Capital Group, which backed Watts’s earlier company, funded the US$6 million seed. SecurityWeek reported the company’s plan to spend it on product development and customer engagement, with a commercial headquarters in San Francisco and R&D kept in Australia.
No reference customer or case study appears in the cited sources.
Circumvent’s AWS Marketplace listing shows a 12-month contract cost of $100,000 for the Circumvent Enterprise Platform, which it describes as onboarding a customer’s cloud providers and security tools. AWS states that pricing depends on the duration and terms of the contract with the vendor, and the listing is a private offer.
No price amount appears on the captured homepage. A private offer can set different terms for an individual buyer.
Circumvent runs as a cloud service hosted on AWS across multiple availability zones, per its Trust Center. It connects to cloud providers, code repositories, security products, and business tools. Circumvent says onboarding with existing scanners takes under a day, with a read-only first week and full autonomy when the customer is ready.
Remediation stays inside the customer’s existing workflow. Circumvent creates tickets in the right project spaceand posts to team channels. Its remediation page says humans still review changes before they are merged and deployed, and the agent that drafts fixes is listed as coming soon. Remediation is therefore assisted today, with engineers making the changes.
Circumvent holds a SOC 2 Type 1 attestation from Sensiba with a report date of March 31, 2026, covering security, availability, and confidentiality. The report was issued April 8, 2026, and is available under a mutual NDA.
Circumvent’s Type 1 report evaluates the design of its controls as of March 31, 2026. Circumvent says its planned Type 2 examination would show operating effectiveness over time, and its Trust Center lists that examination as in preparation.
The listed controls include mandatory multi-factor authentication for production access, isolated development, testing, and production environments, and a policy that customer data is never used for AI training. Circumvent also says its agents’ decision log can be exported as SOC 2 and ISO evidence bundles.
Circumvent builds its product as a layer that pulls together findings from many tools. Its integration list spans AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud and the code repository services GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. It also names scanners including Wiz, Snyk, Orca Security, and Tenable, and the work tools Jira, Confluence, and Slack.
The integration list is a roster of connectors, and Circumvent documents no partner or reseller program beyond its AWS Marketplace listing.
Michael Watts founded Cloud Conformity, which Trend Micro acquired in 2019, and co-founded Circumvent with CTO Thomas Bui. Infosecurity Magazine described Cloud Conformity as giving companies visibility into their AWS and Azure environments, alerts, and remediation priorities. Startup Daily reported the sale as a $100m deal.
Bui previously held roles in banking, government, and at Uber. Paladin backed both Cloud Conformity and Circumvent, and Watts wrote that the repeat backing removed much of the early friction a new company faces.
| Id | Source | Tier | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| f1 | Circumvent: homepage | official | 2026-10-03 |
| f2 | SmartCompany: Two Aussie startups raised 12.7 million this week | press | 2026-10-03 |
| f3 | Paladin Capital Group: Circumvent seed funding announcement | official | 2026-10-03 |
| f4 | SecurityWeek: Circumvent Raises 6 Million for Cloud Security Platform | press | 2026-10-03 |
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