DataTribe Announces Fourth Annual Cybersecurity Start-Up Challenge Finalists

DataTribe, a global cyber foundry that invests in and co-builds next-generation cybersecurity and data science companies, announced today the finalists of its fourth-annual DataTribe Challenge. The competition is poised to identify seed stage start-ups with a vision to disrupt cybersecurity and data science.

“We are thrilled to be back in-person and to welcome our finalists this year at DataTribe headquarters. They will each present to a phenomenal group of judges on market opportunity, innovation, and overall company strategy,” said John Funge, Managing Director of DataTribe. “All of the finalists truly exemplify DataTribe’s mission to identify talent and technology that is over the horizon and bring the next phase of innovations to market.”

Finalists will present a pitch and answer questions from judges on November 3, 2021. Three finalists will split $20,000 in prize money, and one winner will be eligible to receive up to $2 million in seed capital from DataTribe.

Finalists:

• ContraForce: Based in Dallas, TX, ContraForce is on a mission to democratize and simplify SecOps for the masses to effectively stop threat actors in their tracks. ContraForce helps businesses improve their ability to detect and respond to threats, so they can combat cyberattacks in a timely manner.
• Grey Market Labs: Based in Arlington, VA, Grey Market Labs’ Replica Platform delivers a new category of secure infrastructure management: Secure Environments-as-a-Service. By providing organizations push-button deployment of complex infrastructure with patented privacy and zero trust, Grey Market enables access to critical data, tools and workflows on-demand, from anywhere.
• QuickCode.ai: Based in McLean, VA, QuickCode enables organizations to unlock the insights trapped in text data to solve the data-labeling bottleneck that is inherent when deploying AI applications at scale. The company’s platform makes it dramatically more efficient for experts to precisely identify the right training data, thereby improving label quality while reducing labeling time and ultimately resulting in more accurate models.

“We’re proud to announce these three finalists,” said Mike Janke, co-founder of DataTribe. “This year the pool of applicants were very concentrated in our areas of data science and cybersecurity, and the quality of applicants was higher than any prior year, making it incredibly difficult for the DataTribe team to narrow it down this far. These companies demonstrate our thesis of offense to defense, as several of the founders have backgrounds in the offensive space within national security. They all demonstrate the innovative leap over the horizon that we look for in any of our investments. We’re ready to provide the eventual winner with the resources to scale their ideas far faster than they probably think is possible.”

The 2021 DataTribe Challenge judges are:

• Bob Ackerman, Founder & Managing Director of AllegisCyber and Co-founder, DataTribe
• Arno Van Der Walt, CISO at Marriott International
• Navin Maharaj, Director at Koch Disruptive Technologies
• Ron Gula, President and Co-Founder of Gula Tech Adventures; Co-founder of Tenable
• Shamla Naidoo, Head of Cloud Security, Netskope, Former Global CISO, IBM

About DataTribe

DataTribe is a startup foundry that invests in and co-builds world class startups focused on generational leaps in cybersecurity and data science. Founded by leading investors, start-up veterans and alumni of the U.S. intelligence community, DataTribe commits capital, in-kind services, access to an unparalleled network, and decades of professional expertise to give their companies an unfair advantage. DataTribe is headquartered in the Washington-Baltimore metro area, in Fulton, Maryland. For more information, visit https://datatribe.com.

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