Darktrace vs Snyk

By valuation, Snyk is the larger company at $7.4B versus $5.3B — a 1.4x difference. Size can also be measured by team: Darktrace employs 1000-5000 people while Snyk has 2000 employees.

Snyk has raised more in total funding at $1.3B, compared to Darktrace's $230M — a gap of $1.1B. Combined, the two companies have completed 10 known funding rounds.

Darktrace leads with an Awaira Score of 85/100, while Snyk sits at 82/100. That 3-point gap reflects real differences in funding, scale, and traction — it's not a vanity metric.

Darktrace was founded by Poppy Gustafsson in 2013. Snyk was founded by Guy Podjarny in 2015. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

Darktrace: Darktrace is an AI cybersecurity company that applies unsupervised machine learning to detect and respond to cyber threats inside enterprise networks, email systems, cloud environments, and operational technology. The Cambridge-based company pioneered the concept of the enterprise immune system, training AI models on each organisation normal network behaviour to identify anomalies that indicate intrusion, insider threat, or ransomware activity in real time without requiring predefined threat signatures.\n\nThe company went public on the London Stock Exchange in 2021, raising approximately $230 million in its IPO after backing from Invoke Capital, Vitruvian Partners, and KKR. Darktrace reports over 9,000 enterprise customers across more than 100 countries, including significant deployments in financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure. The company has expanded from network detection to autonomous response capabilities through its Antigena product, which can quarantine infected systems and neutralise threats without human intervention.\n\nDarktrace competes in the AI-native cybersecurity market against CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, and Microsoft Defender, as well as against SIEM vendors including Splunk and IBM QRadar. The company valuation and public market performance have been volatile, reflecting broader uncertainty around AI cybersecurity spending cycles and questions about autonomous response effectiveness in complex enterprise environments. Its AI self-learning approach, applied consistently across network, email, cloud, and OT security, remains a distinctive architecture compared to detection-rule-based competitors, and the Poppy Gustafsson leadership profile has made Darktrace a flagship case study for UK technology entrepreneurship. Snyk: Snyk is a developer security platform founded in 2015 that specializes in identifying and fixing vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies, container images, and infrastructure-as-code. The company operates at the intersection of DevSecOps and AI, providing automated scanning and remediation tools integrated into development workflows. Snyk's core products include dependency scanning, container security, infrastructure-as-code scanning, and code analysis capabilities powered by machine learning and vulnerability intelligence databases. The platform integrates with popular development tools and CI/CD pipelines including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Jenkins, enabling developers to identify security issues during development rather than post-deployment. With a valuation of $7.4 billion and total funding of $1.32 billion across Series G funding, Snyk has achieved significant growth in the expanding application security market. The company serves enterprise customers across multiple industries, addressing the critical challenge of securing software supply chains as organizations increasingly rely on open-source components. Snyk competes with companies including Sonatype, Aqua Security, and Anchore in the developer-first security space. The platform's approach emphasizes shifting security left in the development lifecycle, reducing remediation costs and time-to-fix vulnerabilities. Growth has been driven by increasing regulatory requirements, rising software supply chain attacks, and enterprise adoption of DevSecOps practices. Snyk uniquely positions security enforcement at the point of code development, enabling developers to fix vulnerabilities before deployment with AI-powered remediation guidance.

Darktrace got there first, launching in 2013 — that's 2 years of extra runway. Snyk didn't arrive until 2015. In AI, that kind of head start means more training data, deeper customer relationships, and a bigger talent moat.

Darktrace has about 1000-5000 employees; Snyk has about 2000. A bigger team usually means more revenue or heavier VC backing, but in AI, small teams can build at massive scale.

Yes — they're direct rivals. Both Darktrace and Snyk compete in AI Security, targeting many of the same buyers. If you're evaluating one, you should be looking at the other.