Circumvent
AI-driven cloud security platform that correlates alerts across existing tools to cut alert fatigue and surface validated, human-verified fixes.
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Circumvent builds an AI and machine-learning platform that ingests alerts from cloud-native, open-source, and third-party security tools, correlating and enriching them into a smaller set of validated findings. Its goal is to reduce the alert fatigue that comes from running multiple overlapping cloud security tools, and to recommend remediations that are checked by a human before action is taken, rather than fully autonomous remediation.
The company was founded in 2024 by Michael Watts and Thomas Bui. Watts previously founded Cloud Conformity, a cloud security posture company that Trend Micro acquired for roughly $100 million in 2019, giving the founding team direct prior experience building and exiting a cloud security product. Circumvent supports AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and serves enterprise customers across the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
Circumvent raised $6 million in seed funding from Paladin Capital Group in June 2025. It maintains R&D in Australia, where it originated, alongside a commercial headquarters in San Francisco for its US go-to-market push. Its differentiator is less about detection coverage than about making existing cloud security stacks produce fewer, higher-confidence signals.
Innovation Matrix Assessment
Founder's prior exit (Cloud Conformity to Trend Micro) suggests execution capability, and the company moved from founding to a US commercial launch within about a year of its seed round.
Directly targets alert fatigue from tool sprawl, a top operational complaint among cloud security teams, with human-verified rather than blind automated remediation.
Only a $6M seed round to date, with claimed enterprise customers in the US, Australia, and New Zealand that remain unnamed publicly.
AI-based alert correlation improves on existing CSPM/CNAPP workflows but builds on top of the existing cloud security tool stack rather than replacing the underlying approach.
No independent benchmarks or named customer outcomes were found publicly; evidence is limited to the company's own funding announcement.
Tool sprawl and alert fatigue in cloud security are persistent, multi-year problems that are unlikely to disappear as cloud environments keep growing in complexity.
Why CISOs Should Care
Cloud security teams are drowning in overlapping alerts from CSPM, CNAPP, and cloud-native tools; Circumvent promises fewer, higher-confidence findings without replacing the tools already in place.
What Makes It Different
It sits on top of an organization's existing cloud security stack as a correlation and enrichment layer, rather than competing as another standalone scanner.
The Matrix Verdict
53/100 — INCREMENTAL INNOVATOR
Circumvent is an Incremental Innovator. The founding team's track record and a credible investor (Paladin) support real near-term execution, but the product is a seed-stage layer on an already crowded category with no independent validation yet.
Editorial Note: Claims vs. Verified Findings
The $6M seed round and founder background are corroborated by multiple independent outlets. Claims of enterprise adoption across three countries are company-stated and not independently named or verified.
Sources
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