A cybersecurity company called Native emerged from stealth this week with $42 million in funding and a thesis that the cloud security market — already crowded with vendors and acronyms — has a fundamental architectural problem that nobody has bothered to fix. The company, led by former Amazon Web Services executives, isn’t pitching incremental improvement. It’s arguing that the entire approach to protecting cloud infrastructure needs to be rebuilt from the network layer up.
That’s a bold claim. It’s also the kind of claim that tends to attract serious money when the people making it have spent years building the infrastructure they now want to defend.
GeekWire first reported on Native’s emergence from stealth, detailing a company that had been quietly building in the background for roughly two years before making any public noise. The startup’s co-founders — CEO Bryan Migliorisi and CTO Josh Stella — both spent significant time inside AWS, where they gained direct exposure to the scale and complexity of modern cloud architecture. Stella, in particular, is well known in cloud security circles. He previously founded Fugue, a cloud security posture management company that was acquired by Snyk in 2022. Migliorisi held senior roles at AWS focused on security operations.
The founding team’s pedigree isn’t just résumé decoration. It’s the core of Native’s pitch to investors and, eventually, to enterprise customers: these are people who understand the internal mechanics of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud at a level most security vendors simply don’t.
Native’s $42 million haul came through a single funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Operator Partners and a group of angel investors that reads like a who’s who of cloud infrastructure veterans. The round is substantial for a company that hasn’t yet disclosed a shipping product or named any customers publicly. But stealth-mode fundraises of this size have become more common in cybersecurity, where the combination of a credible team and a large addressable market can unlock capital well before revenue materializes.
So what exactly is Native building?
The company’s central argument is that cloud security has been bolted on as an afterthought — a patchwork of monitoring tools, scanners, and dashboards layered on top of infrastructure that wasn’t designed with those tools in mind. Most existing solutions, Native contends, operate at the application or identity layer while largely ignoring the network layer, where much of the actual attack surface lives. The result is visibility gaps. Alerts without context. And a persistent inability to stop lateral movement once an attacker gains initial access.
Native is building what it describes as a network-native security platform — one that embeds directly into the cloud network fabric rather than sitting alongside it. According to GeekWire’s reporting, the technology is designed to provide real-time network-level visibility across multi-cloud environments, enabling detection and response capabilities that current tools can’t match because they simply don’t have access to the same data.
Stella, in comments reported by GeekWire, framed the problem bluntly: cloud providers give customers a shared responsibility model but don’t give them adequate tools to fulfill their end of that responsibility, particularly at the network layer. “The network is the most underleveraged data source in cloud security,” Stella said. It’s a line that will resonate with security engineers who have struggled to get the same kind of packet-level insight in cloud environments that they had in traditional data centers.
The timing of Native’s launch isn’t accidental. Enterprise spending on cloud security continues to accelerate, driven by a combination of regulatory pressure, high-profile breaches, and the sheer complexity of managing security across multiple cloud providers simultaneously. Gartner has projected that worldwide spending on cloud security will exceed $7 billion in 2026, up from around $5.6 billion in 2024. And yet, despite that spending, breaches involving cloud infrastructure have become more frequent, not less.
Part of the problem is tool sprawl. The average large enterprise now runs somewhere between 40 and 70 discrete security tools, many of which generate overlapping alerts and few of which communicate effectively with each other. CISOs are drowning in dashboards. And the security operations teams responsible for actually responding to threats often lack the network-level context they need to distinguish a genuine intrusion from a noisy false positive.
Native is positioning itself squarely against this fragmentation. Rather than adding another monitoring layer, the company says it’s building a platform that operates within the network itself, providing what amounts to a nervous system for cloud infrastructure. The analogy isn’t perfect — no analogy ever is — but the intent is clear: move security closer to the data plane, where the actual traffic flows, rather than relying on metadata and logs that arrive after the fact.
This approach has technical precedent. In traditional on-premises environments, network detection and response (NDR) tools from companies like Darktrace, ExtraHop, and Vectra AI have long operated at the network layer, analyzing traffic patterns to identify anomalies. But those tools were designed for environments where the network was a known, physical thing — switches, routers, cables. In the cloud, the network is abstracted, virtualized, and controlled entirely by software. That abstraction makes traditional NDR approaches difficult to apply directly, which is part of why the cloud network layer has remained a relative blind spot.
Native’s bet is that it can solve this abstraction problem by building technology purpose-designed for cloud-native network architectures from the ground up. The company hasn’t disclosed specific technical details about how it achieves this — stealth mode, after all, means keeping some cards close — but the general direction suggests deep integration with cloud provider APIs and virtual network constructs like VPCs, subnets, and security groups.
The competitive field Native is entering is anything but empty. Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, Wiz, and Orca Security all offer cloud security products with varying degrees of network visibility. Wiz, which raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation in 2024 before agreeing to be acquired by Google for $32 billion, has been particularly aggressive in expanding its cloud security platform. And CrowdStrike has invested heavily in extending its Falcon platform into cloud workload protection and cloud-native application protection.
But Native’s founders would argue that none of these players have truly solved the network-layer problem. Most cloud security platforms today focus on configuration management, identity and access management, or workload-level threat detection. Network-level analysis in the cloud remains nascent, largely because the data is harder to access and harder to interpret at scale.
There’s a broader industry context here, too. The cloud security market has been consolidating rapidly, with large platform vendors acquiring point solutions to build out integrated offerings. Google’s acquisition of Wiz. Cisco’s acquisition of Splunk. Palo Alto’s string of acquisitions including Bridgecrew and Cider Security. The pattern is clear: big companies want comprehensive platforms, and they’re willing to pay billions to assemble them.
For a startup like Native, this consolidation dynamic cuts both ways. On one hand, it makes it harder to compete against incumbents with massive sales forces and existing customer relationships. On the other, it creates acquisition optionality. If Native can demonstrate genuine technical differentiation at the network layer, it becomes an attractive acquisition target for any platform vendor looking to fill that specific gap.
Andreessen Horowitz’s involvement adds another dimension. The firm has been one of the most active investors in cybersecurity over the past five years, backing companies like Wiz, Drata, Strata Identity, and others. A16z’s willingness to lead a $42 million round for a pre-launch company signals conviction not just in the team but in the market thesis. The firm’s cybersecurity partners have publicly argued that network security in the cloud is an underfunded category relative to its importance — a view that aligns precisely with Native’s positioning.
The company is headquartered in the Seattle area, which makes geographic sense given its AWS roots. Seattle has become a significant hub for cloud security startups, benefiting from the concentration of cloud engineering talent drawn by AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud’s substantial presence in the region. Native’s early team reportedly includes engineers recruited from AWS, Microsoft, and other major cloud providers — people who understand the internals of cloud networking at a systems level.
One question that will follow Native as it moves from stealth to market: can it deliver on the promise of network-native cloud security without introducing unacceptable performance overhead or operational complexity? Embedding deeply into the network layer sounds appealing in theory, but enterprise customers are justifiably wary of any security tool that could interfere with production traffic or add latency to critical applications. The company will need to demonstrate that its technology can operate transparently — providing visibility and protection without becoming a bottleneck.
Another open question is multi-cloud support. Most large enterprises run workloads across two or more cloud providers, and any security platform that only works well on AWS (however deep its founders’ expertise there) will face limitations. Native has indicated that multi-cloud support is a core design principle, but the proof will be in the implementation. Each cloud provider has different network architectures, different APIs, and different approaches to virtual networking. Building a truly unified network security layer across all of them is an engineering challenge of considerable magnitude.
The $42 million in funding gives Native roughly 18 to 24 months of runway to build, ship, and begin proving its technology in production environments. The cybersecurity market moves fast, and the window for establishing a beachhead in cloud network security won’t stay open indefinitely. Competitors are watching. And the large platform vendors, always hungry for differentiated technology to acquire, are watching too.
For now, Native represents something increasingly rare in cybersecurity: a company that chose to build quietly, hire carefully, and avoid the hype cycle until it had something substantive to talk about. Whether the technology delivers on the ambition remains to be seen. But the combination of deep AWS expertise, a clearly articulated market gap, and $42 million in backing from one of the industry’s most prominent venture firms makes Native a company worth tracking closely in the months ahead.
The cloud security market doesn’t need another dashboard. It might, however, need a new foundation. That’s what Native is trying to build.
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