Many of the vendors on this list have embedded AI across their platforms at this point—from utilizing AI and machine learning to detect advanced threats or remediate code security issues to providing enhanced threat analysis and investigation using GenAI.
Cybersecurity luminary Kevin Mandia is among the many experts in the industry who are highly optimistic about the possibilities for using generative AI to aid cyberdefense teams. While it’s well-known that the availability of GenAI technologies such as ChatGPT has helped to intensify phishing and other cyberthreats, Mandia—the founder and former CEO of Mandiant, now owned by Google Cloud—told CRN that the benefits of GenAI for security outweigh the risks of the technology.
“I think GenAI is going to help the defender more,” he said, both with enabling greater security operations capabilities as well as with expediting the training of security professionals.
[Related: 10 Cybersecurity CEOs On AI’s Impact On The Market In 2025]
As part of CRN’s AI 100 for 2025, we’ve selected 20 cybersecurity vendors that are working to turn this potential for a positive security impact from GenAI into the real thing. While countless security vendors have now made GenAI and other AI-powered capabilities core to their product strategies, these vendors have stood out with differentiated offerings that bring AI-driven automation and simplification across key areas such as security operations, cloud security, email protection and network security.
Many of the vendors have ultimately embedded AI across their platforms at this point—from utilizing AI and machine learning to detect advanced threats or remediate code security issues to providing enhanced threat analysis and investigation using GenAI.
What follows are the 20 hottest AI cybersecurity companies of 2025.
Abnormal Security
Evan Reiser
Co-Founder, CEO
Building on its AI-based behavioral analytics email security offering, Abnormal Security debuted an “AI coworker” for protecting email inboxes with the launch of its AI Security Mailbox. It provides a customized response to employees who report a potential attack about whether the reported email was found to be malicious.
Armis
Yevgeny Dibrov
Co-Founder, CEO
Armis Centrix cyber exposure management platform updates included its Centrix Insights AI assistant, which can provide answers to queries on vulnerabilities and autonomously diagnose issues. Other key AI moves have included the integration of Nvidia BlueField-3 DPUs for enhanced protection of critical infrastructure.
Barracuda Networks
Hatem Naguib
President, CEO
Key AI-powered security capabilities from Barracuda Networks include threat response and mitigation for email security—which was made available across all tiers of its SaaS-based Email Protection platform—as well as account takeover protection that leverages analysis of outbound email activity in addition to inbound email monitoring.
Cloudflare
Matthew Prince
Co-Founder, CEO
Cloudflare’s AI-powered capabilities include its AI Assistant for Security Analytics, which can answer queries on security events and allow users to uncover anomalies and potential cyberattacks. It also debuted a tool that can generate customized rules for the web application firewall, the AI Assistant for WAF Rule Builder.
CrowdStrike
George Kurtz
Founder, CEO
CrowdStrike’s GenAI security operations tool, Charlotte AI, provides capabilities including automation of detection triage and prioritization. Its Falcon Next-Gen SIEM utilizes Charlotte AI to provide correlation of related context around security incidents and generation of incident summaries.
Cyera
Yotam Segev
Co-Founder, CEO
Cyera expanded beyond its data security posture management offering with the recent acquisition of data loss prevention startup Trail Security for $162 million, bringing an AI-powered approach to DLP onto the Cyera platform. Key capabilities include utilizing AI to analyze DLP alerts and provide details on why certain actions were flagged.
Darktrace
Jill Popelka
CEO
Darktrace unveiled its ActiveAI Security Platform with capabilities including new firewall rule analysis for improved threat prevention and integrations with third-party network tools providing decryption keys and decrypted traffic feeds. It plans to integrate forensic investigation technology from its planned acquisition of Cado Security.
Fortinet
Ken Xie
Founder, Chairman, CEO
Major launches from Fortinet have included the rollout of integrations with its AI-driven security assistant, FortiAI, including with FortiNDR Cloud and Lacework FortiCNAPP. Meanwhile, it recently enhanced its FortiAnalyzer security operations tool with a number of AI-powered updates.
Inky
Dave Baggett
Founder, CEO
Inky rolled out new capabilities that utilize GenAI to analyze every email intended for a customer’s inbox, rather than just a portion of emails. While using LLMs to scan all emails is cost-prohibitive for most vendors, Inky has developed a way to use GenAI efficiently enough to do so.
Netskope
Sanjay Beri
Founder, CEO
Netskope has introduced Proactive Digital Experience Management Enterprise, featuring improved network performance diagnostics powered by AI and machine learning. Other updates have included the launch of what the company called the “first GenAI-powered CASB.”
Orca Security
Gil Geron
Co-Founder, CEO
Orca Security expanded its AI-powered application security offerings to include AI-Driven Remediation for software code. The capabilities provide an accelerated and simplified process for fixing misconfigurations during runtime. Orca also offers AI-generated remediation steps for responding to security alerts.
Palo Alto Networks
Nikesh Arora
Chairman, CEO
Palo Alto Networks unveiled its Precision AI capabilities, embedded throughout its portfolio, while introducing enhancements to Prisma SASE, including LLM-powered data classification for improved accuracy. Other moves have included the debut of Cortex Cloud, the successor to Prisma Cloud.
Proofpoint
Sumit Dhawan
CEO
Proofpoint introduced AI-powered capabilities for its email security offerings, including LLM-based detection that analyzes emails prior and after delivery and at the time of a click. The vendor also recently acquired data security startup Normalyze, which brings AI-powered data security posture management to its platform.
SentinelOne
Tomer Weingarten
Co-Founder, CEO
SentinelOne’s Purple AI technology enables simplified threat hunting—across first- and third-party data—as well as natural language queries for accelerated responses to threats. Meanwhile, Purple AI also powers its automated investigation capability that can conduct threat investigations on an analyst’s behalf.
Snyk
Peter McKay
CEO
AI-powered enhancements from Snyk include the debut of its DeepCode AI Fix capabilities, which enable developers to easily address insecure code from within the integrated developer environment. Key differentiators include “verified” recommendations for fixes along with utilization of self-hosted LLMs.
Tanium
Dan Streetman
CEO
Tanium updated its Autonomous Endpoint Management platform with new capabilities such as an AI-driven natural language interface, Tanium Ask, which enables users to rapidly query data from large numbers of endpoints. It also introduced real-time intelligence on changes to endpoints.
Torq
Ofer Smadari
Co-Founder, CEO
Torq utilizes AI across its security hyper-automation platform used by security operations teams, including for accelerated threat detection, prioritization and response. Major recent updates to the Torq platform have included the debut of agentic AI capabilities, which can provide autonomous analysis and remediation of threats.
Trend Micro
Eva Chen
Co-Founder, CEO
Trend Micro debuted a major update to its Vision One cybersecurity platform that introduced new AI-powered cyber risk management capabilities. The expanded capabilities leverage AI to offer enhanced discovery, prioritization and remediation of threats, enabling streamlined management of cyber risk.
Wiz
Assaf Rappaport
CEO
Wiz utilizes AI and machine learning across its cloud-native application protection platform. It also has acquired AI-powered cloud remediation startup Dazz and debuted its AskAI tool for answering queries that are related to threat investigations. Last month, Google Cloud announced its intent to buy the company.
Zscaler
Jay Chaudhry
Founder, Chairman, CEO
Along with its data protection offerings that can secure against data exposure using public GenAI tools, Zscaler has developed AI infrastructure to power its entire zero-trust security architecture. Key AI-driven capabilities include data classification, security copilots as well as detection of zero-day vulnerabilities.
