Headcount: 23 (+283%)
Specialism: MSSP
HQ: Manchester
Manchester has usurped London and other cities as the UK’s leading source of cyber talent, the CEO of this high-growth MSSP said in 2024 following its decision to relocate there.
Serial entrepreneur Matt Lovell founded SMB-focused Microsoft Sentinel specialist CloudGuard in 2020, alongside Javid Khan (see Q&A, below, for more).
Its average monthly headcount stood at 23 in its year to 31 August 2025, up from 17, 12 and six in the three previous years (employee numbers have since risen to 28, he told us).
View the wider Fast-Growth 50 here.
Q&A with CloudGuard CEO Matt Lovell
How have you been able to increase headcount in a flat market?
Headcount has grown entirely through organic expansion into new customers. Our approach is to nurture long-term engagements at all levels within the business and skills. Over the last two years, we have provided two university undergrad placement opportunities with Manchester Metropolitan and now also with Queens University Belfast. It’s part of our long-term commitment to developing, investing in and nurturing the best cyber-security talent. And they have all come back and chosen CloudGuard to begin their careers.
What mega trend do you think will most shape the year for your company?
Agentic AI and agent-to-agent security. As AI embeds and interacts increasingly in human-led processes, protecting workflows, interfaces, data and agentic logic security will shape autonomous security this year.
Does the rise of AI and automation make it less likely you’ll continue to add headcount at the same rate in the coming years?
From the outset, we have been automation focused. An equivalent SOC today by incident volume would be 4.2x greater in terms of headcount. Our SOC engineering and automation team is the same size as our SOC team!
Name one thing you have planned for the next 12 months
Dynamic red and purple teaming – pen testing will be replaced by continuous testing strategies.
