SYN Ventures is back with a $300M cybersecurity-focused fund

Last summer, SYN Ventures of West Palm Beach announced it had launched a $165 million venture fund to invest in the next wave of transformational cybersecurity companies. Now the VC firm is  back with a second, much bigger fund in the red hot sector.

 SYN Ventures, a firm founded and led by former Fortune 500 CISOs and C-level security leaders, announced this week the closing of its Fund II, at $300 million. Like in Fund I, SYN will focus on early-stage companies and will leverage the team’s decades of operational security experience and rich networks. 

SYN Ventures says it invests in disruptive ecurity companies in the cybersecurity, industrial security, national defense, privacy, regulatory compliance, and data governance industries. Investments include Adlumin, Boldend, Halcyon, Metabase Q, Netography, Pangea, Phosphorus, Query.ai, SecZetta, Sevco Security, ShiftLeft, SynSaber, TrackerDetect, Revelstoke, Transmit Security, and others. 

“As cybersecurity has come to the forefront of every human on the planet, the pace of innovation is exploding for both our industry and adversaries,” said Jay Leek, managing partner at SYN Ventures.

 Leek founded the firm with Patrick Heim, also a managing partner, Before founding SYN, Leek was a co-founder of ClearSky Security and a former Blackstone CISO. Patrick Heim was partner and CISO for ClearSky Security, former head of security at Dropbox and chief trust officer for Salesforce.com.

In addition to the closing of Fund II, Syn announced that co-founder and former Chief Scientist of Cylance, Ryan Permeh, has joined full time as an operating partner.

The firm also has a network of seasoned security advisors and CISOs. Some of the advisors include Cradlepoint CISO, Ben Carr; Chipotle CISO, Dave Estlick; Vista Equity Partners Managing Director and CISO, Adrian Peters; USAA CSO, Jason Witty, and others.

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Nancy Dahlberg