The Stage Where Cyber Startups Break Through
A signature program of Cyber Innovation Conference
2026 · October 26–27 · Washington, DC
Submissions Closed

2026 Challenge Finalists
We’re excited to announce the five finalists for the ninth DataTribe Challenge!
The DataTribe Challenge is the headline event in the afternoon on Tuesday, October 27th, at Cyber Innovation Conference 2026, where these five exceptional startups will take the stage after hands-on coaching. These finalists, along with other promising cyber innovators, will also showcase their technologies in the Cyber Innovation Expo Hall, gaining high-impact exposure to top investors, industry leaders, and strategic partners.
Spotlight Security

Spotlight is the AI security orchestration layer for the ~2,000 devices in a typical factory. Like Plaid connects to any bank, our lightweight agents connect to any machine (IT, IoT and OT) to find and fix security risks at the edge, with human approval. Spotlight emerged from a $2.1M grant benchmarking LLMs on cybersecurity, with findings used by OpenAI and Anthropic. We live in operational environments, won the Women in AI Pitch Competition, and are a Black Hat SecTor startup finalist.
LayerV
Charlemagne Labs

Charlemagne Labs builds Charley, an on-device AI assistant that helps organizations detect social engineering and prevent sensitive-data exposure across email, texts, messaging apps, and the browser. Grounded in AI threat research and benchmarking, Charley runs locally on each device, preserving business and customer data sovereignty while reducing human-error risk.
Sondera
Sondera builds semantic integrity for agents: assurance that they act within the bounds of your intent. Organizations write their own rules for agents in natural language, from security and compliance requirements to everyday business logic, and Sondera verifies their translation into code that returns a deterministic verdict on every agent action before it runs. Adversarial simulation stress-tests agents and their policies against misuse and unexpected behavior, helping teams uncover gaps before deployment. Sondera's research on turning natural-language instructions into verifiable policy has been presented at the ICML 2026 AIWILD workshop, and its open-source coding agent enforcement tool was presented at Black Hat USA 2026 Arsenal.
Navasana
Navasana is the first intelligent cyber MGA, backed by Lloyd's A+ paper. Cyber MGAs used to grow by hiring more underwriters. We grow by turning underwriting judgment into a system that learns. Our VIIRA platform empowers brokers, underwriters, and policyholders to manage cyber and AI risk at machine speed.

A program built to accelerate
your cybersecurity startup.
The DataTribe Challenge is a unique program designed to sharpen your story, raise your profile, and put your company in front of the people who can change its trajectory.
As a finalist, you'll workshop your messaging with DataTribe coaches and present to a room full of cyber-focused venture firms, industry visionaries, potential customers, and a panel of cyber-expert judges.
Five finalists. One transformational moment.
Messaging workshops with DataTribe coaches
A live stage at Cyber Innovation Conference in front of cyber's most influential audience
Free promotion and press coverage across the cybersecurity ecosystem
A share of $25,000 in prize money
The official DataTribe Challenge Finalist title

Meet the Judges


Madison Horn
Chief Advisor, National Security & Critical Infrastructure at WWT


Mike Janke
Co-Founder & Managing Partner, DataTribe


Rob Joyce
Former Cybersecurity Director at NSA


Matt Dunlop
SVP, Cybersecurity & Engineering at Visa


Ron Gula
President & Co-Founder, Gula Tech Adventures, Co-Founder of Tenable
