Community Choice voting for the 2026 season closed on July 10, 2026.
What is the Community Choice Award?
A separate award decided by public vote, independent of the jury awards. Each completed share of a profile on LinkedIn, Facebook or X counted as one vote.
Defakto delivers a fundamentally different approach to Non-Human Identity (NHI) security, making it one of the most complete and effective solutions available for organizations managing non-human identities at scale. While many vendors focus on discovery, vaulting, rotating secrets, or brokering access, Defakto advances a model of secret eradication, eliminating long-lived credentials entirely by issuing short-lived, cryptographically verifiable identities to workloads, services, pipelines, and AI agents.
At the core of Defakto’s approach is an identity-first architecture built for modern automation. Rather than adding more layers of visibility and governance around static credentials, Defakto replaces them with just-in-time identity issuance that is continuously verified and policy-bound. This removes entire categories of risk while enabling enterprises to operate securely in highly automated environments. Security teams gain centralized governance and auditability, while platform engineering teams benefit from an infrastructure-native model that integrates directly into Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and large-scale compute systems without slowing delivery.
Trusted by Fortune 2000 enterprises and some of the world’s most technically demanding brands, Defakto enables organizations operating at massive scale to transition from credential management to dynamic, policy-driven identity. The result is reduced breach risk, simplified compliance, and the ability to scale automation with confidence. Organizations using Defakto have replaced manual certificate rotations, emergency credential recovery, and fragmented identity tooling with a unified platform designed for enterprise-scale operations.
In a market crowded with tools that attempt to manage the symptoms of credential risk, Defakto stands apart by removing the root cause of machine identity risk altogether, delivering identity as a secure, automated foundation for cloud, automation, and AI at enterprise scale.
About this category: Best Cybersecurity Startup
The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards recognize young cybersecurity companies with early proof that their product or service works. There is no limit on age or funding: any company that considers itself a startup can enter.
An independent jury of security practitioners, analysts and CISOs scores each nomination on leadership, innovation and impact. Each nomination competes in its category against organizations of similar size and region. Entry packages, sponsorship and public votes do not affect the jury's scores.
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Cast your vote by sharing this nominee’s profile on LinkedIn, Facebook, or X, using the buttons above. Each completed social share adds one Community Choice vote.
Votes cast by July 10, 2027 will determine the Community Choice winners (independent of the jury awards). Winners will be announced before Black Hat USA.
What is the Community Choice Award? →
Community Choice is a separate award track from the jury-selected Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. Jury winners are chosen by expert judges, while Community Choice winners are determined by public voting. A nominee may be honored by the jury, the community, or both.
2026 winners in Best Cybersecurity Startup
To keep judging fair, each entry is judged against peers in its segment, so a category can have more than one Gold winner.