Circumvent, a cloud security start-up, announces $6 million in early funding from Paladin Capital Group, the cyber and secure AI investor.
Circumvent is building a next-generation, proactive cloud security platform designed to help cloud and security teams cut through the noise and take immediate action on what matters most.
Organisations are drowning in alerts from security tools spread across their infrastructure and application stack. The platform leverages 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, it prioritises risk and enables precise, source-level remediation.
Start-up leadership
Circumvent was co-founded by Michael Watts and Thomas Bui. Michael was the founder and CEO of Cloud Conformity, a former Paladin Capital Group portfolio company, which cybersecurity giant Trend Micro acquired in 2019.
Thomas is the CTO at Circumvent and previously held roles across banking, government, and at Uber. The pair previously worked together building world-class products to solve complex business problems.
Multi-agent AI system
This system enables Circumvent to provide a fully guided remediation experience
As a foundational part of its platform architecture, Circumvent is 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 high-impact, low-effort remediation seamlessly integrated into DevSecOps workflows.
The Circumvent team is working with multiple enterprises across the USA, Australia and New Zealand to solve this problem at scale for the largest AWS, Azure and Google Cloud customers.
Authority comment
“Security and cloud teams are under immense pressure to move fast without increasing risk,” said Michael Watts, co-founder and CEO of Circumvent.
“We’re not just generating more alerts—we’re building the intelligence layer that helps teams understand what to fix, why it’s important, and how to take immediate action to resolve the root cause.”
Benefits of the platform
“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,” said Thomas Bui, co-founder and CTO.
“The platform is built to integrate seamlessly into existing DevSecOps workflows, improving security efficiency without slowing innovation.”
Funding impact
Circumvent will maintain its R&D hub in Australia, leveraging deep local engineering expertise
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, leveraging deep local engineering expertise.
Its new San Francisco commercial HQ will act as the base for its entry into the US market and broader global customer engagement.
Supporting entrepreneurs
“We’re thrilled to be working again with Michael Watts and the exceptional founding team at Circumvent,” said Tom Clute, Principal at Paladin Capital Group.
“Our 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.”
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