Cloud security startup Circumvent has raised AUD6 million in early funding from Paladin Capital Group, a cyber and secure AI investor.
The funding will accelerate product development, support early customer engagement, and establish a San Francisco-based commercial headquarters. Circumvent will maintain its research and development 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.
Circumvent was co-founded by Michael Watts and Thomas Bui. Watts was the founder and CEO of Cloud Conformity, a former Paladin Capital Group portfolio company, which cybersecurity giant Trend Micro acquired in 2019. Bui is the CTO at Circumvent and previously held roles across banking, government and at Uber. The pair previously worked together building products to solve complex business problems.
“We’re thrilled to be working again with Michael Watts and the exceptional founding team at Circumvent,” said Paladin Capital Group Principal Tom Clute. “Circumvent is addressing one of the most critical challenges in cloud security today – closing the gap between identifying risks and driving effective, scalable remediation.”
Circumvent is building a cloud security platform designed to help cloud and security teams cut through the noise and take immediate action on what matters most. 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.
As a foundational part of its platform architecture, Circumvent is also 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 US, Australia and New Zealand to solve this problem at scale for the largest AWS, Azure and Google Cloud customers.
“Security and cloud teams are under immense pressure to move fast without increasing risk,” said Watts. “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.”
