Abstract Early-stage firms play a crucial role in driving innovation and developing new products and services, particularly in the field of cybersecurity. Therefore, evaluating their performance is vital for investors and policymakers. This work presents a financial evaluation of early-stage firms’ performance in 19 cybersecurity sectors using a private-equity dataset from 2010 to 2022 retrieved from Crunchbase. We compare cybersecurity sectors regarding the amount raised over funding rounds and post-money valuations while inferring missing observations with a machine-learning method. We observe significant investor interest variations across categories, periods, and locations. In particular, we find the average capital raised (valuations) to range from USD 7.24 mln (USD 32.39 mln) for spam filtering to USD 45.46 mln (USD 447.22 mln) for the private cloud sector. We additionally find that the entire cybersecurity sector is both underfunded and undervalued with respect to the broader information technology sector. Next, we assume a log process for returns computed from post-money valuations and estimate the expected returns, systematic and specific risks, and risk-
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