Abnormal Security vs Adaptive Shield

Side-by-side comparison of AI visibility scores, market position, and capabilities

Abnormal Security

EmergingSecurity

General

San Francisco AI email security (private, $5.1B valuation); $250M Series D (Wellington Management), behavioral AI detects novel BEC/phishing in Microsoft 365/Google Workspace competing with Proofpoint and Microsoft Defender.

AI VisibilityBeta
Overall Score
D18
Category Rank
#521 of 1167
AI Consensus
55%
Trend
stable
Per Platform
ChatGPT
22
Perplexity
29
Gemini
16

About

Abnormal Security is a San Francisco, California-based AI-native cloud email security company — founded in 2018 by Evan Reiser (CEO) and Sanjay Jha (CTO), both former Google engineers — using behavioral AI to detect and block business email compromise (BEC), phishing, ransomware, account takeovers, and AI-generated social engineering attacks against enterprise email environments (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace) through approximately 600 employees. The company raised a $250 million Series D funding round at a $5.1 billion valuation, led by Wellington Management with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners, Menlo Ventures, Insight Partners, and the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund — bringing Abnormal's total funding to approximately $580 million. Abnormal Security's approach to email security is fundamentally different from traditional signature and rule-based approaches: rather than scanning emails for known malware hashes or suspicious links against threat databases, Abnormal's AI models each employee's historical communication behavior (who they email, how they write, what times they send messages, what financial requests they make) and flags deviations from established baselines as anomalies requiring investigation — enabling detection of novel BEC attacks that have no prior signature, AI-generated phishing that passes link reputation checks, and vendor invoice fraud that impersonates legitimate suppliers.

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Adaptive Shield

ChallengerCloud Security, CNAPP & Identity Security

SaaS Security Posture Management

Tel Aviv Israel SSPM platform; acquired by CrowdStrike 2023; deep security configuration management across 150+ SaaS applications.

About

Adaptive Shield is a SaaS security posture management (SSPM) company founded in 2019 by Maor Bin and Jony Shlomoff in Tel Aviv, Israel. The company pioneered the SSPM category, which Gartner formally named as a distinct security market in 2021. Adaptive Shield's platform connects to an organization's SaaS applications via native APIs and continuously monitors security configurations, user permissions, and integration settings against security best practices and compliance frameworks. When a configuration drifts from the desired state — for example, multi-factor authentication being disabled for a user, or a permissive external sharing setting turned on — the platform alerts security teams and provides remediation guidance.\n\nAdaptive Shield raised $30 million before being acquired by CrowdStrike in 2023 for approximately $300 million. CrowdStrike integrated Adaptive Shield's SSPM technology into its Falcon platform as Falcon SaaS Security, giving CrowdStrike customers deep visibility into the security posture of their SaaS estates alongside CrowdStrike's existing endpoint, identity, and cloud security capabilities. The acquisition reflected CrowdStrike's strategy to expand from endpoint-centric security to comprehensive platform coverage.\n\nPrior to acquisition, Adaptive Shield supported security configuration checks across more than 150 SaaS applications including Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zoom, Slack, GitHub, and Workday. Its check library covered thousands of individual configuration settings mapped to CIS Benchmarks, SOC 2, and other frameworks. The platform also provided an integration risk monitoring capability that inventoried third-party apps connected to core SaaS platforms, similar to the SSPM expansion toward full SaaS security management.

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