Cloud security startup Circumvent raises $6 million

Sydney-based cloud security startup Circumvent has announced $6 million in early funding from Paladin Capital Group, a cyber and secure AI investor.

The funding will accelerate product development, support early customer engagement, and establish a San Francisco-based commercial headquarters.

Circumvent will maintain its R&D hub in Australia, but its new San Francisco commercial HQ will act as the base for its entry into the US market and broader global customer engagement.

Circumvent is building a proactive cloud security platform leveraging AI and machine learning to ingest, correlate, and enrich alerts from cloud-native, open-source, and third-party security tools.

By aligning these signals with real-time business context, Circumvent says the platform prioritises risk and enables precise, source-level remediation.

As a foundational part of its platform architecture, Circumvent is also developing a Multi-Agent AI System - a network of intelligent agents designed to autonomously manage complex prioritisation and remediation tasks at scale.

This system enables Circumvent to provide a fully guided remediation experience, where agents operate like virtual security experts, learning from each customer’s unique environment to deliver remediation integrated into DevSecOps workflows.

Circumvent was co-founded by Michael Watts and Thomas Bui. Watts was the founder and CEO of Cloud Conformity, a former Paladin Capital Group portfolio company, which Trend Micro acquired in 2019. Bui is the CTO at Circumvent and previously held roles across banking, government and at Uber. 

Bui said by aligning alerts with real-time business context, Circumvent ruthlessly prioritises risks, identifies root causes, and enables engineering teams to take precise, targeted remediation actions at the source.

“The platform is built to integrate seamlessly into existing DevSecOps workflows, improving security efficiency without slowing innovation," he said.

Paladin Capital Group principal Tom Clute said Paladin's mission is to support entrepreneurs who are transforming cybersecurity through innovation from the ground up.

"Circumvent is addressing one of the most critical challenges in cloud security today: closing the gap between identifying risks and driving effective, scalable remediation," he said.