If cybersecurity isn’t recession-proof, what is?

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It is always hard to know how a startup category will fare in a downturn. But if you had asked me a few months ago, I would have expected cybersecurity to be relatively recession-proof, just like data observability. What I didn’t have in my cards yet, though, was generative AI and animal agriculture. — Anna

A tough H1

Numbers are out on investment into cybersecurity last quarter, and they are not good, to a surprising extent. According to Crunchbase, cybersecurity startups only raised $1.6 billion in venture funding in the second quarter of the year.

Not only does this represent a 63% quarter-on-quarter decline, but this is also the lowest amount this sector raised in any given quarter since Q4 2019.