Cody Cornell and Brian Kafenbaum just locked in $45 million. But let’s be clear, this isn’t about more cash for a security startup. This is about a company built by security vets who got tired of watching threat intel teams drown in alerts and duct-taped dashboards. Cody Cornell and Brian Kafenbaum didn’t just build a product. They built a lifeline.
Founded in 2014 and forged in the fires of real cyber trenches, DISA, DHS, IBM, American Express, Swimlane was never about selling dashboards. It was about survival. It was about speed. And now, it’s about dominance.
This latest growth round, led by Energy Impact Partners and Activate Capital, with Trinity Capital rolling heavy, takes Swimlane to $204 million raised. The timing isn’t a coincidence. Profitability is on deck for Q3 2025, and global channel expansion is heating up like a zero-day vulnerability in the wild.
James Brear, Swimlane’s CEO since 2020, knows how to scale. Veriflow, Procera, Cisco, he’s seen the edge, lived in the boardroom, and walked the IPO plank. With Bob Parker holding down CFO duties (straight outta SentinelOne) and Frans Xavier owning the engineering game as CTO, this isn’t a leadership team, it’s a power rotation.
And the numbers? Let’s talk about real growth. Since 2017: revenue up 544%. Since 2022: 110% lift. Swimlane’s AI-powered Turbine platform now secures more than 50 Global1000 companies, 26 federal agencies, and 5 of the world’s top integrators. It’s not just adoption, it’s momentum with teeth.
Hero AI, launched in 2024, is doing 25 million actions a day per customer, running 17x faster than anything SOAR ever promised. This isn’t just security automation. It’s what happens when low-code meets high-stakes, and the result is a platform that thinks, acts, and scales like an operator with a grudge. Turbine’s visual Canvas, the Active Sensing Fabric, 800+ integrations, ISO42001 for AI, this is infrastructure with swagger.
Swimlane isn’t pivoting. It’s executing. 75% of revenue flows through partners like Optiv and Cyderes. That’s by design. In North America, they’re already channel-dominant. Now they’re planting flags in Europe, Asia, and six new APAC territories with partners like Macnica and NTT DATA. The goal? Fully channel-led, globally fed.
You don’t raise $45 million heading into profitability unless you’re aiming higher. IPO talk isn’t a whisper, it’s a plan. Swimlane wants to be a $100M break-even beast within 3–5 years. If that sounds ambitious, you haven’t been paying attention.
Cody Cornell and Brian Kafenbaum didn’t just found a company. They exposed the inefficiency in security operations and turned the pain into product. And with Sameer Reddy (Energy Impact Partners) and David Lincoln (Activate Capital) steering boardroom vision, the next chapter won’t be quiet.
So yeah, Swimlane just secured $45 million. But really, it secured something far more dangerous: position.
