Andy Smith

Andy Smith co-founded Tracebit in 2023 with Sam Cox, its chief technology officer, and is its chief executive. Both spent five years growing the engineering team at Tessian, the London email security company, before starting Tracebit. Tessian’s founders, Tim Sadler and Ed Bishop, were among its early angel investors.

Canaries in the cloud

Tracebit applies deception, an established security technique, to modern cloud estates. It creates decoy resources, known as canaries, inside a customer’s cloud environment. Legitimate users have no reason to touch them, so any interaction is a strong sign that an intruder is inside. The company uses cloud providers’ own interfaces to deploy canaries in as little as 30 minutes, without hardware, and says its aim is to cut incident response times from months to minutes.

The principle behind the company is one Smith has argued for since the start. “Sam and I started Tracebit 3 years ago, with the belief that ‘assume breach’ is only going to become more critical,” he wrote in March 2026.

A $20m Series A and a New York office

On 17 March 2026 Tracebit raised a $20m (£15m) Series A led by FirstMark, with Accel, MMC Ventures, Tapestry VC and CCL. That took total funding to $25m, after a $5m seed round led by Accel in 2024. It opened an office in New York alongside its London headquarters and added Perimeter Canaries, Deceptive Artifacts and support for Google Cloud Platform.

Customers named by the company and in coverage of the round include Riot Games, Snyk, Docker, Synthesia and Admiral Insurance. Tracebit monitors about 5 billion events a week, according to Tech.eu, up from 2.4 billion at the time of its seed round.

Why it matters to UK technology buyers

For UK organizations running on public cloud, deception adds a detection layer that works on a simple rule: anyone touching a decoy should not be there. That makes it a practical complement to monitoring tools that have to separate real attacks from normal activity. Admiral’s place on the customer list shows the approach reaching regulated UK businesses as well as software companies.

Smith has taken a technique security teams have long used by hand and packaged it for cloud teams that lack the time to build their own. The Series A gives him the means to make it a standard part of cloud security.