Neon Cyber’s purpose is to move the focus of current cybersecurity from the infrastructure to the workforce.
The company emerged from stealth, September 16, after raising seed funding from Austin-based Silverton Partners in April 2025.
Much of cybersecurity’s mitigations were designed years ago to protect infrastructure and data, which was correct at the time. But company use of the internet has changed. Cloud computing and remote working have hastened the demise of the perimeter, and the arrival of AI has increased the speed of attacks. The old methods no longer work, yet cybersecurity has not adapted its core defense.
The need now is to move security closer to the cause of insecurity – which is the workforce rather than the infrastructure. It is the workforce that is phished and socially engineered into causing or allowing breaches; and AI is making both far more effective.
This is the premise behind Neon Cyber. “We believe that securing the workforce is the missing piece in today’s cybersecurity technologies,” says Cody Pierce (co-founder and CEO). “For too long, organizations have invested heavily in infrastructure protection while leaving people exposed.”
The approach taken is to sit in the browser and get between the workforce and almost all threats. The browser is simultaneously the primary operating tool and a difficult technology to secure – it has become the de facto unprotected operating system of the user. Neon’s purpose is not to restrain the user (which has been the major approach in the past, adding friction and interrupting work) but to protect the company from bad outcomes inadvertently caused by the user through the browser, and at the same time provide visibility into the browser.
The solution is a browser extension. If deployed on managed devices, it is impervious to user avoidance or disruption. “It takes about five minutes to deploy it across an organization,” adds Pierce.
The extension’s phishing protection illustrates the platform’s function. Current attempts try to block malicious URLs accessed through the browser – but that’s a fool’s errand given the depth and sophistication of redirects now in use. It is almost impossible to create a list of URLs to block. At the same time, the quality of social engineering has become supercharged by AI.
Instead of blocking everything, Neon follows the phish until it can decide whether to block or allow. At some point it may become confident that this is a phish. “We make that decision through the AI and behavioral algorithms built into the platform,” explains Pierce. The customer is able to configure the platform to automatically block progress in real time, or to issue a pop-up warning to the user.
It isn’t simply a process to protect the user from causing harm. Because Neon is residing in the browser, it gives the company’s security team a new depth of visibility providing a detailed forensic view of what happens. If the platform is configured to simply warn the user of a phish, that warning could potentially be ignored or missed, and malware downloaded.
“Let’s say your EDR catches the malware. Well, we give you the full journey that that user took: this is where the email came from, this is what the user clicked, these are the websites the user visited – and this was the file that was downloaded. The analysts can reconstruct the complete process, all the way up and down the stack,” explains Pierce.
Mark St. John (co-founder and CTO) adds, “There is still a massive blind spot in the browser – whether it’s just encapsulated traffic to and from, or the actions that take place inside of the browser itself, and the responses that occur in the browser. We’re able to get all those little bits of telemetry up to the operations teams and analysts so they don’t have to cobble the information together from their different sources. We’re directly at the original source and we can provide it all.”
It is also worth noting the system has the potential to highlight the actions of a malicious insider simply through the visibility it provides. “We’re bringing something new that will help with insider threats because of the observability we provide,” comments Pierce. “You can observe and understand the intent of an action, whether it is potentially malicious or not malicious. And you can see what data is being sent out of the company, and where it is going.” The visibility provided by Neon works in both directions – providing the ability to see malicious insiders as well as external attackers.
Neon Cyber was founded in April 2024, and is headquartered at Fort Worth, Texas. Its co-founders are Cody Pierce and Mark St. John, who earlier founded AlphaWave. AlphaWave was acquired by LookingGlass in June 2021.
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