Tracebit is redefining how organizations detect and respond to security breaches in the cloud. Instead of relying on traditional alerting systems that attempt to distinguish malicious behavior from legitimate activity, the company embraces an “assume-breach” mindset.
Its technology introduces canaries—purpose-built decoy cloud resources—into an environment so that any interaction with them becomes an immediate indicator of compromise. This approach turns the usual model of anomaly detection on its head. Rather than trying to discover unusual behavior among legitimate resources, Tracebit makes the decoy itself the anomaly. When an attacker touches it, teams receive a high-confidence signal that something is wrong.
Mission: Reducing Response Time from Months to Minutes
The mission at the heart of Tracebit is both ambitious and urgent: shrink the global mean time to detect and respond to a cloud security incident from months to minutes. In many environments today, attackers move silently for long periods before anyone notices. Missed alerts, noisy systems, and incomplete coverage create gaps that adversaries exploit.
Tracebit seeks to eliminate those blind spots. Its decoy resources are strategically placed across cloud estates and configured to behave like authentic assets. When accessed, they deliver clear, immediate, and actionable intelligence. The goal is not just quicker detection but dramatically reducing uncertainty, allowing defenders to respond decisively rather than sift through ambiguous alerts.
How Tracebit’s Cloud-Native Canaries Work
Tracebit integrates with an organization’s cloud infrastructure using secure read-only access. Once connected, it analyzes naming conventions, resource patterns, and architectural layouts. Based on this understanding, it recommends a set of canaries tailored to the environment.
These canaries can be deployed in minutes using infrastructure-as-code, enabling security teams to integrate Tracebit directly into Terraform pipelines. After deployment, the canaries are not static markers. They evolve as the environment evolves, updating automatically so that attackers cannot catalog them or learn to avoid them. Each canary is designed to blend seamlessly among real cloud resources, ensuring that any interaction is almost certainly malicious.
Scalability Without Complexity
One of Tracebit’s most notable strengths is its ability to scale without overwhelming teams. Historically, deception technologies required manual tuning, specialized hardware, or intensive upkeep.
Tracebit takes a different approach by making its deception layer cloud-native from the ground up. Canaries can be deployed widely and inexpensively, creating broad coverage across accounts and regions.
With a lightweight footprint and automated maintenance, Tracebit removes the barriers that previously kept deception techniques confined to highly sophisticated or well-funded organizations. The result is a platform that any company—regardless of size or security maturity—can adopt to strengthen its defensive posture.
The Team Behind the Vision
Tracebit is led by co-founders Andy Smith, the company’s CEO, and Sam Cox, its CTO. Together they bring extensive cybersecurity and engineering experience, grounding the company’s strategy in deep technical expertise. They are joined by a highly capable founding team that includes engineers Michael Aldridge, Dancho Atanasov, Niall Gallagher, and Edward Jones, each contributing to the platform’s robust technical foundation.
Alongside them, Miquel Casanovas Juvell leads go-to-market efforts, and Gemma Jacobson supports operations and growth. The broader team includes specialists such as Rahul Pai and Frank Scott, reflecting a company built on talent, clarity of purpose, and a shared belief in reshaping how defenders detect intrusions.
Backed by Cybersecurity Leaders and Top Investors
Tracebit’s vision has resonated across the cybersecurity landscape. The company secured a seed investment round of approximately five million dollars, led by Accel, with participation from Tapestry VC and several influential angel investors.
The roster of supporters includes industry leaders such as Snyk founder Guy Podjarny, Elastic CISO Mandy Andress, and former Tessian CISO Josh Yavor. Their involvement signals strong confidence not only in Tracebit’s technology but also in its ability to influence the future of cloud security.
Such backing underscores the belief that deception, when executed at scale and with minimal friction, can become a core pillar of modern cyber defense.
Addressing the Core Challenge of Cloud Detection
The challenge Tracebit aims to solve stems from the inherent complexity of cloud environments. Traditional detection systems often drown teams in false positives or miss signals altogether when attackers mimic legitimate patterns of behavior. Rules can be bypassed. Anomaly-detection models can be fooled or simply overwhelmed by the dynamism of cloud workloads.
Tracebit’s approach addresses that problem directly. By inserting high-fidelity decoys that no one should ever interact with during normal operations, the platform generates alerts that are clean, precise, and contextually meaningful. It gives security teams exactly what they need: a clear indication that something is wrong, where it is happening, and what may come next.
Adoption and Real-World Impact
Tracebit’s technology has already demonstrated its ability to operate at significant scale. It protects hundreds of cloud accounts and has deployed thousands of canary resources across customer environments. These canaries generate millions of events weekly, providing continuous visibility across large, distributed cloud estates. Customers value not only the accuracy of the alerts but also the simplicity of integrating Tracebit into existing workflows. The platform connects seamlessly with tooling such as Slack, Teams, PagerDuty, and Splunk, ensuring that the right people receive the right signals at the right time.
A Transformative Step Forward for Cloud Security
Tracebit offers a compelling answer to one of the most persistent challenges in cybersecurity: how to detect real intrusions quickly, reliably, and at scale. By reimagining deception as a cloud-native, automated, and accessible capability, the company empowers organizations to adopt an “assume-breach” posture without heavy overhead. Its technology, team, and early traction all point toward a future where defenders are no longer overwhelmed by noise but equipped with clear, actionable intelligence when it matters most. In a world where cloud complexity grows by the day, Tracebit stands as a decisive and innovative force reshaping the path to stronger, faster, and more reliable threat detection.
Andy Smith | Co-Founder & CEO at Tracebit
Andy Smith is the co-founder and CEO of Tracebit. Under his leadership, the company raised $5 million from Accel and Tapestry VC to make security canaries for intrusion detection widely accessible. He is passionate about helping security teams enhance their detection capabilities and regularly engages with professionals looking to strengthen their security posture.
“Our mission is to reduce the global mean time to response to an incident from months to minutes with a solution that is quick to deploy and simple to
