Obsidian

Obsidian Security was founded in February 2017 in Newport Beach, California, by three cybersecurity veterans from Cylance: Glenn Chisholm (former EVP & CTO of Cylance, and previously CISO of Telstra), Ben Johnson (co-founder of Carbon Black/Bit9, a prior endpoint-security company), and Matt Wolff (former Chief Data Scientist at Cylance). The trio's thesis was that as enterprises rapidly moved core business operations into SaaS applications they did not own or fully control, security teams lacked visibility into user behavior, configuration risk, and data exposure inside that SaaS layer -- a blind spot analogous to what endpoint security had solved for on-premises infrastructure a decade earlier. The company launched publicly in June 2017 (covered by Fortune as 'Ex-Cylance Tech Chief Starts New Company') on the back of a $9.5 million Series A led by Greylock Partners, whose partner Asheem Chandna joined the board.

Obsidian built a SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) platform centered on a proprietary 'knowledge graph' that models identities, configurations, integrations, and activity across an organization's SaaS estate to detect account takeover, insider risk, excessive privilege, and third-party/OAuth supply-chain threats. The company raised a Series B (reported at roughly $20M) in 2019 with continued backing from Greylock and other early investors, and in April 2022 closed a $90 million Series C co-led by Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and IVP, with participation from existing investors Greylock, Wing Venture Capital, and GV (Google Ventures); Menlo's Venky Ganesan joined the board. That round brought total funding to roughly $119.5 million. Around this period the company transitioned CEO leadership: founder Glenn Chisholm moved to an executive chairman/product role, and Hasan Imam -- previously Chief Revenue and Customer Officer at Shape Security -- became CEO in January 2021, steering the company toward broader enterprise go-to-market scale.

Through 2023-2025, Obsidian expanded from core SSPM into adjacent areas: automated SaaS compliance, identity threat detection and response (ITDR), and -- as generative AI and AI agents became embedded in SaaS workflows -- a dedicated 'AI Security Suite' covering shadow AI detection, prompt security, AI agent visibility/governance, and AI-SPM. Product milestones included expanding platform coverage to 200+ enterprise applications (May 2026), a February 2025 partnership with SentinelOne for unified endpoint/SaaS threat protection, a September 2025 launch of SaaS AI agent defense capabilities (covering Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce, ChatGPT Enterprise, and n8n), and a January 2026 'end-to-end SaaS supply chain protection' launch. The company also built out its executive bench with hires from CrowdStrike and JumpCloud, including CPO Khanh Tran (April 2025) and CTO Xinran Wang (an EVP of Engineering promoted to CTO, previously of Shape Security and Palo Alto Networks).

Business model

B2B SaaS; sells enterprise cybersecurity subscriptions (SaaS Security Posture Management / AI-SPM platform) to large enterprises and mid-market organizations, delivered via API/read-only integrations with SaaS and AI platforms (Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Snowflake, ServiceNow, GitHub, Databricks, Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Agentforce, ChatGPT Enterprise, etc.).

Subscription-based ARR from enterprise security licenses; company reports 100+ customers spending over $100K annually and 14+ customers spending over $1M annually as of August 2026.