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CRN Named Us a 2026 Stellar Startup. Here’s Why We Built Another Security Tool.

Chuck CrawfordFounder & CEO · · 5 min read
Loom Security was named to CRN’s 2026 Stellar Startups list in the Security category.

CRN named Loom Security to its 2026 Stellar Startups list in the Security category. Here’s the problem CINQUE was built to solve, and a test to see whether your team has it too.

This recognition means a lot to all of us at Loom Security.

I’m proud of our team, and grateful to the customers and partners who got us here.

I could stop there. But a recognition post that doesn’t help you do your job isn’t worth your time.

So here’s the problem that got us on that list, and a test you can run on your own environment this week.

It starts with a sentence most security teams are tired of hearing:

“We built a new security product.”

Fair enough. Most teams already run more tools than they can connect, and more tools haven’t given anyone more visibility.

So does security really need another product?

Not one that just sees one more slice of the pie. What security teams need is a way to make the tools they already own make sense together.

That’s exactly why we built CINQUE.

Every tool is telling the truth. That’s the problem.

Our leadership team has decades of experience in this industry, on both the customer side and the partner side. We’ve sold the tools. We’ve implemented them. And we’ve been accountable for the environments they protect.

So we know how much work still lands on security teams after the tools are in place.

Think about what each one tells you:

  • Your identity platform shows a successful login.
  • Your device platform shows a healthy endpoint.
  • Your network controls show an allowed connection.

Each one is correct. And each one is a slice.

But what none of them can tell you is the part that matters:

  • What happened across the whole journey
  • Whether it made sense for the business
  • What deserves your attention

Answering that still means opening console after console and lining up timestamps by hand.

That’s not a tooling gap. It’s a correlation gap.

What the gap looks like on an ordinary morning

Here is an example. One morning, four things happen:

  • 6:12 AM: An unmanaged laptop signs in on a contractor account.
  • 6:19 AM: A service account that’s been dormant for 60 days wakes up and requests new OAuth scopes.
  • 6:31 AM: That host takes its first-ever path toward the finance subnet.
  • 6:47 AM: An unusual volume of data is staged from a finance share to an external sync tool.

Four signals land in three different consoles. Each one sits below the triage threshold.

Do you ignore it, or fix it?

You ignore it. Because they’re 4 separate alerts.

However, read together, they tell one story: finance data being staged to leave the company.

And that story only happens when you read all five control points together: Identity, Device, Network, Application, and Data.

That’s how CINQUE helps.

Try this on your own stack

Ask your team what one identity did yesterday across all five control points. Then see how far you get.

Pick one identity: a person, a service account, or an AI agent. Then try to answer three questions about what it did yesterday. No new tools required.

  1. Where did it go? Trace it across Identity, Device, Network, Application, and Data.
  2. Was that normal for the work it does and for how it works?
  3. If something was off, what should happen next, and who owns the fix?

While you work, keep score:

  • How many consoles did you open?
  • How long did it take?
  • Where did you have to guess?

Then run the same test on a service account or an AI agent. (These are the identities least likely to have a documented normal.)

If the answers took several consoles and a fair amount of guesswork, the correlation gap is genuine and important to think about. That’s not a knock on your team or your tools.

It’s just the natural space between them, because none of them connect to each other.

What changes when you can answer those questions

Teams come to CINQUE through different doors. Some are modernizing identity governance. Some are strengthening Zero Trust. Some are trying to get a handle on shadow AI and non-human identities.

But the need underneath is the same: connect identity, behavior, and business context so your team can make good decisions, using telemetry from the tools you already own.

Evidence For Zero Trust

Most Zero Trust work is validated on paper. You have an architecture diagram, a set of policies, and an access review.

But you usually don’t have evidence.

Persona baselines give you behavioral evidence that the architecture you designed is the norm for your tech environment.

Why a channel recognition fits how we build

CRN’s Stellar Startups list recognizes young technology vendors that are innovating and helping solution providers grow.

That second part matters most to us, because our years on the partner side shaped how we bring CINQUE to market.

Partners are the ones who understand a customer’s goals, evaluate the technology, and make it work in practice. When CINQUE surfaces a new data point, that finding points to the technology, expertise, or services needed to close it.

That’s where a partner’s business begins.

So we built the Fusion Partner Program around that shared opportunity. Every deal runs through a partner. There are no tiers, no fees, and no certifications to join.

That commitment to the channel is a big part of why this recognition from CRN means so much to us.

Want to join us as a partner? Visit this page to learn more.

Thank you

To our team, our customers, and our partners: thank you for the care, the hard questions, and the trust. Being named a CRN 2026 Stellar Startup is a milestone we’re glad to share with you.

Our focus, to help organizations see the whole journey, connect it to how the business actually operates, and act on the risks that matter, is helping many teams secure their data.

And I am very grateful for that.

See the gap in your own environment

If the test provided above took more consoles than you’d like, let’s look at your environment together.

In a Discovery Workshop, we’ll take a look at the identities in your tech together. At the end, you’ll get a report with your personas, the risk hiding between your tools, and a prioritized roadmap mapped to the tools you use, to help you fix the correlation gap. None of your tools will be displaced, and there’s nothing to uninstall afterward.

Book a Discovery Workshop

Chuck Crawford
Founder and CEO, Loom Security

P.S. A few more places to go from here:

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