Challenge Accepted!
XM Cyber Named a Challenger in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms

The word is out!

We are thrilled to announce that XM Cyber has been named a Challenger in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms. In a highly competitive market, we feel this recognition is a powerful testament to our unique Exposure Management-native approach and our commitment to helping organizations reduce risk in a meaningful and measurable way.

With the massive volume of threats generated each month, organizations need a proactive way to address the ones that create the greatest risk. The Gartner Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework is widely recognized to be the ideal way to address the exposures – misconfigurations, identity weaknesses, security control gaps, CVEs, and more – that put organizations at risk. According to Gartner Research Hype Cycle™ for Security Operations, 2025, “EAPs support continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) programs by providing a centralized view of prioritized exposures, which enables organizations to take key actions to prevent breaches. EAPs prioritize findings for remediation based on exposure severity, asset criticality, business impact, likelihood of exploitation and compensating control context.”

In this blog, we’ll explain what it means for us to be named a Challenger in the Magic Quadrant™ for Exposure Assessment Platforms, share why we believe our position is a sign of great things to come, and outline our vision for the future – for XM Cyber and for Exposure Management.

What We Believe It Means to Be a Challenger

First off, let’s explain a bit about the Gartner Magic Quadrant. It evaluates vendors on two key axes: their Ability to Execute and their Completeness of Vision.

For XM Cyber, we believe our placement in the Challengers Quadrant is a powerful validation of our core strengths. In our view, our placement as a Challenger reflects our proven track record of delivering an effective platform that provides tangible results for our customers today. It acknowledges our ability to help security teams identify, prioritize, and fix the most critical security risks in their environment. In a market where a lot of vendors make even more promises, we feel a Challenger recognition is a testament to our focus on delivering on those promises and helping organizations achieve a measurable reduction in risk.

What Our Placement in the Challenger Quadrant Means To Us

We feel that our placement in the Challengers Quadrant indicates that we have a strong Ability to Execute. We believe this is a direct recognition of our unique, exposure management-native approach. Since our inception in 2016 – back in a small industrial parking garage with a shoestring team – we have been working on how to help organizations efficiently reduce the exposures that actually create the most risk.

We’ve always been driven by the mission to help organizations efficiently prioritize and eliminate the exposures that present the greatest risk to their business and in turn their customers. It’s this vision that led us to build a platform that takes into account an attacker’s point of view, focusing in on the truly reachable, actually exploitable and most impactful exposures across the entire attack surface, from the outside-in.

Our Attack Graph Analysis™ engine serves as the backbone for modern security operations by providing not just visibility into the assets and identities that make up their attack surface, but how they interconnect, the potential for lateral movement and the most likely points an attacker would leverage to enter your environment and access your crown jewels.

Focusing on choke points while continuously validating potential breach points and attack paths, the platform provides targeted remediation guidance to ensure teams prioritize actions that have the biggest impact on reducing organizational risk rather than chasing theoretical exposures and endless lists of loosely-prioritized CVEs.

While Exposure Management is clearly having a moment (look around at any Security conference and you’ll see what we mean), we feel that the XM Cyber platform wasn’t retrofitted to meet the category definition of the term; it was purpose-built from the ground up to provide a single, comprehensive solution for implementing all five stages of the Gartner CTEM framework. We have always known that effective security is built on a continuous cycle of risk reduction, and our platform delivers the capabilities needed for each stage, moving beyond traditional vulnerability management to a more proactive, holistic, and threat-informed strategy.

Our platform has been battle-tested in some of the world’s most scaled environments. It provides integrated management across all attack surfaces – cloud, on-prem, OT, legacy, containers, and AI tools – ensuring exposures are prioritized based on true risk, not just isolated lists. Ongoing support ensures a seamless transition from a fragmented approach to a successful, comprehensive one. We believe this integrated and continuous vision for the future of Exposure Management is what made us get recognized.

Our Vision for the Future

We feel this recognition as a Challenger is not an end point, but a launch pad for us.

Our vision has always centered on making security operations truly proactive, threat-aware and business-aligned. Our strong offering for EAP together with our long time leading solution in adversarial exposure validation (AEV) and for us, recognition as a challenger marks our next phase of pioneering proactive security. Until this point, exposure discovery, prioritization and remediation has largely occurred in a vacuum, separate from exposure validation initiatives like penetration testing or breach and attack simulation (BAS).

The XM Cyber Platform is breaking down those walls, providing the industry’s only integrated solution to enable every stage of the CTEM process – bridging the gap between the exposures that exist across an organization and proving the exposures that really matter. Moving forward, we’re committed to continue disrupting conventional approaches by extending our attacker-centric view to emerging attack surfaces like agentic AI and the cloud services that support AI workloads, deepening IoT/OT device coverage, and enhancing our ability to drive efficient exposure remediation via ecosystem integrations and workflow automation.

It’s time for enterprises to evolve their traditional vulnerability management practices into proactive and integrated exposure management that breaks down silos, filters out noise, and empowers cross-team collaboration around fixing the highest impact risks to the business.

Read the report to learn more about why XM Cyber has been recognized as a Challenger.

Gartner Disclaimer: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Exposure Assessment Platforms, By Mitchell Schneider, Dhivya Poole, Jonathan Nunez, November 10, 2025. GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner and Magic Quadrant & Hype Cycle is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.