A cybersecurity founder who had a $100 million exit is back with a new idea and a $9.2 million Seed round from Paladin Capital

Serial cybersecurity entrepreneur Michael Watts is back with new startup, kicking off a proactive cloud security platform, Circumvent, with US$6 million (A$9.2m) Seed round from Paladin Capital Group.

Watts was previously founder and CEO of Cloud Conformity, which Paladin backed in 2018 with a US$3.1 million Series A. The following year the startup was acquired by cybersecurity giant Trend Micro in a $100m deal.

After seeing out his gardening leave, Watts started thinking about what’s on the horizon for cybersecurity and teamed up with long-time collaborator Thomas Bui as CTO to cofound Circumvent, which has offices in Sydney, and San Francisco, and is focused on changing the way enterprises manage the security of their cloud infrastructure and applications.

Traditionally, dealing with cybersec alerts is done manually, the security teams triaging the importance of each one.

Circumvent is developing a Multi-Agent AI System—a network of intelligent agents designed to autonomously manage complex prioritisation and remediation tasks at scale. The system provides fully guided remediation, where agents operate like virtual security experts, learning from each customer’s unique environment to deliver low-effort remediation integrated into DevSecOps workflows. The result frees up people to resolve critical risks faster and more effectively.

Watts said organisations are drowning in alerts from security tools spread across their infrastructure and application stack. Circumvent leverages AI and machine learning to ingest, correlate, and enrich alerts from cloud-native, open-source, and third-party security tools.

“Security and cloud teams are under immense pressure to move fast without increasing risk,” he said.

“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.”

Circumvent is already working with multiple enterprises across the USA, Australia and New Zealand for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud customers.

Bui said the funding will accelerate product development, support early customer engagement, and establish a San Francisco-based HQ for its entry into the US market and broader global customer engagement. Circumvent’a R&D hub will stay in Australia, leveraging deep local engineering expertise.

“By aligning alerts with real-time business context, Circumvent ruthlessly prioritises risks, identifies root causes, and enables engineering teams to take precise, targeted remediation actions at the source,” Bui said.

“The platform is built to integrate seamlessly into existing DevSecOps workflows, improving security efficiency without slowing innovation.”

Paladin’s Tom Clute is once again backing Watts and his vision.

“Our mission is to support entrepreneurs who are transforming cybersecurity through innovation from the ground up,” he said.

“Circumvent is addressing one of the most critical challenges in cloud security today: closing the gap between identifying risks and driving effective, scalable remediation.”