# Cole Grolmus

Cole Grolmus analyzes cybersecurity companies, comparing their financial performance, products, and competitive strategies. Their posts explain topics such as security-company revenue, platform expansion, and the challenges facing companies like Zscaler and SentinelOne.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/cole-grolmus/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colegrolmus
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, cybersecurity, ai-security
- Based on 11 dated posts, latest 2026-10-03

## Summary

Cole Grolmus is useful for analysis of cybersecurity company strategy, financial disclosures, and competition.

- Best for: A cybersecurity investment research firm seeking competitive platform analysis and market education.
- Not for: Product launch campaigns needing demos, trials, or neutral side-by-side comparisons.
- Check first: Confirm audience data and partnership terms, since posts do not provide them.

### Takeaways

- Judge a cybersecurity company against the rivals it actually competes with.
- Platform expansion is a multi-year question, and the disclosures are the test.
- The $1 billion revenue mark is the industry's scarcest milestone.

## Main ideas

- **Judge a cybersecurity company against the rivals it actually competes with**: Cole Grolmus argues that revenue size is the wrong comparison set for a platform company. SentinelOne's roughly $1 billion of revenue puts it in range of many solid cybersecurity businesses, but most are domain specialists, so the financial comparison is about all that carries over. Because SentinelOne competes across endpoint, cloud, SecOps, data and AI security, they argue it has to be measured against companies competing in the same markets — and that "good for a company our size" does not survive that test. The numbers: CrowdStrike at $5.84B ARR growing 25% and $332.8M of net-new ARR, against SentinelOne at $1.218B growing 22% and $56M of net-new ARR, about 5.9 times less. Net-new ARR growth of 4% year over year and 13 additions to the $100K+ ARR customer cohort are the specific evidence they cite against a re-acceleration story. SentinelOne has secured a place as a solid multi-product cybersecurity company, but the path from there to the industry's top tier is hard to see.
- **Platform expansion is a multi-year question, and the disclosures are the test**: On Zscaler, Cole Grolmus separates the quarter from the strategic event after it. Q4'26 revenue and ARR grew 25%, reaching $3.77B ARR, but the more consequential move was the Agentic SOC launch, which they treat as the start of a new era and possibly the thing that defines Zscaler's next decade. The components were assembled over several years: existing telemetry and enforcement, Avalor for combining data sources, Red Canary for SOC expertise, detection logic and third-party integrations, plus smaller acquisitions. The test they apply is whether the disclosures keep up. The "emerging products" category rose from 14% to 27% of new business between FY'22 and FY'25 amid inconsistent reporting; Data Security passed $500M ARR in Q3 with no Q4 update, and an AI-security figure above $400M from Q1 had not been updated. Management expects Agentic SecOps to contribute financially in the second half of FY'27, with a larger impact in FY'28. They also name the open risk: Zscaler is not usually thought of as a SecOps company alongside established SIEM vendors or CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne, and will have to earn the confidence of the leaders running security operations centers.
- **The $1 billion revenue mark is the industry's scarcest milestone**: Cole Grolmus frames a single number as the organizing fact of the market: only eight public cybersecurity companies have $1 billion or more in annual revenue. Stretching the definition to hybrid companies with a material share of revenue from cybersecurity raises the total only to 14. They call the billion-dollar mark one of the most evasive milestones in the story of the industry so far and note it is the number every cybersecurity company with big aspirations is chasing. This short framing post sets the yardstick used in the company-specific writing: which businesses belong in a top-tier comparison at all, and why the count stays small no matter how it is counted.
- **Some revenue figures mean something different from what they appear to mean**: The Optiv post is a teaching piece about how hardware and software value-added reseller revenue works, starting with a two-sided answer to whether Optiv is a billion-dollar cybersecurity business. Third-party software and hardware that Optiv resells counts as Optiv revenue, and by that measure the company sells billions of dollars annually. But most of that gross sales money goes to the product partners who build the products, leaving Optiv a low-percentage margin that nets to hundreds of millions. Its services business — consulting, implementations, managed services — is also in the hundreds of millions, smaller than the Big Four or a firm like Accenture. Counting gross VAR sales makes Optiv a billion-dollar business; excluding them, the net VAR margin plus services would need to exceed a billion, which Cole Grolmus guesses is close but cannot confirm. They credit named contributor Dino B. at Altitude Cyber and unnamed contributors for helping sort out the question.
- **AI security matters most when the timing around it changes, not just the product**: Describing CrowdStrike's Fal.Con conference, Cole Grolmus calls it cybersecurity's Lollapalooza and ranks it alongside a World Series, Super Bowl and other major events in their experience. The argument is about timing: SafeMind and Guardian, the AI security announcements, landed just as the debate over frontier AI safety, alignment and pacing intensified, and they read that sequence as making the announcements potentially world-changing. They agree with a view attributed to George Kurtz — that there is no going back, that the threats are already here, and that frontier AI is needed for cybersecurity now. The reasoning: CrowdStrike assembled people, research, data, products and partnerships to give defenders better tools than they have had. The post reflects on the announcements; the longer article has the detail.

## Work to read

- [The $1 billion club: how Cole Grolmus frames the cybersecurity market](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colegrolmus_there-are-only-eight-public-cybersecurity-activity-7194731642450558976-r-eE)
- [SentinelOne’s platform strategy measured against CrowdStrike](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colegrolmus_sentinelones-q227-was-a-tough-quarter-for-activity-7506044298715623424-dXKf)
- [Zscaler’s Agentic SOC and the bet on a second act](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colegrolmus_zscalers-most-interesting-strategic-move-activity-7507831981313884161-dxce)
- [Why Optiv’s billion-dollar revenue figure is confusing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colegrolmus_heres-the-answer-about-whether-optiv-is-activity-7201989513143889921-_Ciq)
- [CrowdStrike’s Fal.Con and the frontier-AI argument](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/colegrolmus_sometimes-you-know-in-the-moment-that-youre-activity-7508955409504768001-pyS6)

## Brand relationships

- **CrowdStrike** (mention)
- **Zscaler** (mention)
- **SentinelOne** (mention)
- **Optiv** (mention)

## Partnerships

Cole Grolmus's posts do not say what partnership formats or terms are available or how to inquire. Across five LinkedIn posts, they publish financial and strategic analysis of public cybersecurity companies: Zscaler's push into SecOps after its Agentic SOC launch, SentinelOne's quarter measured against CrowdStrike, the short list of public cybersecurity companies above $1 billion in revenue, and how revenue recognition works for a reseller like Optiv. None carries a sponsor disclosure, media kit, rate information or partnership contact, and no brand relationship is presented as paid. The only outward acknowledgement is a thank-you to a named contributor at a cyber firm for help explaining Optiv's business model—a research credit, not evidence of a commercial arrangement. Before budgeting a campaign, ask about format, deliverables, pricing, review and approval, disclosure, exclusivity and lead time.

## Alternatives

- Jay Chaudhry: Choose Jay Chaudhry when the need is the platform vendor's own strategic argument rather than an outside read of the numbers: how a large zero trust platform frames AI-driven attacks, why it argues firewall and VPN designs cannot protect autonomous agents, and how named customer transformations at Dow and Viatris are used in CIO and CISO rooms. For a cybersecurity investment research firm tracking Zscaler, that gives a first-person version of the zero trust and securing-AI thesis, including the collaboration posture with Anthropic and OpenAI. It is most useful as context beside the financial comparison, not as the comparison itself.
- Deepen Desai: Choose Deepen Desai when the need is security-operations detail rather than market scoring: what defenders actually test and deploy against AI-driven attacks. Desai's posts describe testing frontier models against real attack and defense scenarios, report that multi-step reasoning lets AI build complex exploit paths instead of only scanning for known vulnerabilities, and list the pieces of an agentic SecOps platform, including unified exposure and threat management, inline telemetry across network, identity, endpoint, cloud, AI, and deception, and closed-loop remediation. That is closer to product and threat-research detail than this profile provides.
- Sam Curry: Choose Sam Curry when the need is guidance on how enterprises and boards should govern agentic AI rather than how the platform market is scored. Curry's posts raise accountability when decisions are made by a network of agents, predictability in non-deterministic systems, and how to use information without exposing it. One post is a recorded conversation on agentic AI's effect on society and cybersecurity, a format suited to executive discussion and podcast or conference placement more than a written competitive teardown.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/