RSA 2025 Key Takeaways

The RSA Conference once again proved its strong presence within the cybersecurity ecosystem, extending far beyond the show floor into hotels, coffee shops, and restaurants throughout San Francisco. Our team had a highly productive week and a broad range of insightful conversations with emerging security companies, large strategics and sector-focused investors. While early discussions naturally centered around tariffs and the broader macro environment, we sensed the focus quickly shifted “back to business” as the week progressed. Below are some observations from our conversations during the week: 

Security for AI vs. AI for Security 

• AI was at the forefront of our conversations again this year, both in the context of solutions which will enable AI to be deployed securely with enterprise organizations, and the increasing implementation of AI within cybersecurity solutions. 

• The discussions around AI appear to have escalated this year, given the proliferation of agentic AI, which creates additional security risks for organizations adopting AI-based workflows and creates new opportunities to implement AI within security workflows as well.
• As we anticipated coming out of 2024, strategic activity has commenced in AI security with the Cisco / Robust Intelligence and Palo Alto / Protect AI transactions, and coming out of RSA ‘25, we expect AI security to remain at the forefront of many strategic conversations. 

The Resurgence of Identity 

• In contrast to the past several years, we felt like identity was a consistent theme in many of our conversations, given the renewed level of company creation in the identity security and governance sectors.   

• A key driver behind this was the concept of “non-human” identities – as organizations increasingly assign identities to devices, servers, and applications in addition to individuals. 

• Agentic AI is also a key part of this discussion – as non-human identities continue to proliferate, organizations will require these identities to be appropriately authorized to take certain actions (e.g. a chatbot enabling access to an organization’s IT infrastructure) and deliver increased automation in a secure fashion. 

Ongoing Momentum in Cyber M&A Activity 

• While this year’s RSA conference took place amidst a cloud of broader macroeconomic uncertainty, most industry participants we spoke with believe that strategic cybersecurity activity should continue, given the continued escalation of the threat landscape and new attack vectors such as agentic AI continuing to emerge.   

• In certain discussions, cybersecurity vendors with significant federal concentration did express concern over potential near-term shifts in defense spending given the emergence of DOGE and broader uncertainty around federal budgets, although most agreed that cybersecurity is still viewed as mission-critical and a top priority for defense organizations going forward. 

• Ahead of the conference, we took a look at cybersecurity activity in Q1 and saw that the volume of transactions and $ value of transactions increased 44% and 534% (64% excluding the $32B Google/Wiz transaction), respectively, over Q1 2024 levels. In light of the potential near-term disruption associated with the implementation of tariffs and uncertainty associated with defense budgets, most parties we spoke with anticipated there could be some near-term disruption in Q2 but remained bullish on continued strategic activity and consolidation in the medium/long-term.  

We look forward to following up and trading notes on RSA and current market trends with participants across the cybersecurity ecosystem in the coming days. Our most recent Cybersecurity market update presentation is also available to download here.