From Growth to Security: How Startups Can Build Cyber Resilience with Purple Teaming

Purple teaming is a collaborative security approach that brings together offensive and defensive teams to improve an organisation’s cyber resilience. Rather than working in silos, the red team (attackers) and blue team (defenders) work side by side in a shared engagement, combining to simulate real-world threats and strengthen the organisation’s ability to detect, respond, and recover.  

This isn’t about assigning blame when detection fails; it’s about closing the feedback loop. Red team operators emulate adversaries using advanced tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), while the blue team observes, detects, and responds in real time. Both sides then analyse the outcomes together to identify blind spots, improve controls, and fine-tune detection mechanisms.  

Unlike traditional penetration testing, purple teaming isn’t a one-way report but a two-way dialogue, tailored to your environment and maturity level. Each test is mapped against frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK to ensure realistic threat coverage and to provide structured insight into how well your defences hold up against known actions and scenarios.  

At Bulletproof, our red teamers lead purple team engagements designed to give startups and businesses of all sizes and maturity, actionable feedback, not generic findings. The result? A focused, iterative process that boosts detection capabilities, accelerates incident response, and lays the groundwork for long-term cyber resilience.

For startups navigating rapid growth and rising security demands, purple teaming offers a practical and adaptable way to improve cyber defences without the overhead of full adversarial simulations or Red Teams.  

Purple teaming also enables threat profiling tailored to your environment. By mapping scenarios to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, the teams can test specific tactics that align with realistic threats, such as credential theft, lateral movement, or endpoint evasion. This keeps the exercise grounded in relevance, helping startups prioritise what matters most.  

Perhaps most importantly, purple teaming is a cost-effective way to level up security maturity. Rather than going straight for larger more complex engagements, startups can use purple team engagements to incrementally improve detection, response, and internal awareness, building resilience step by step.  

It's a method that aligns well with agile teams: collaborative, iterative, and focused on outcomes that support both growth and security. 

Purple teaming isn’t just a concept; it’s a hands-on process. For startups, the goal is to run lightweight, high-impact exercises that strengthen internal defences and build team capability over time. Here are a few practical examples:  

Phishing  with Detection Metrics  

Simulate the delivery and post breach actions of a targeted phishing email to validate detection gaps within the initial phases of the kill chain. The focus isn’t just on  clicks, but on whether alerts are triggered, logs are captured, and responses are coordinated in a timely way.  

Endpoint Detection & Log Visibility Tests  

Run controlled attacks on endpoint devices to test antivirus, EDR, and logging configurations, to discover whether threats are being logged correctly and if alerts are firing as expected? Also, can defenders trace activity across systems?  

Split-Phase Exercises: Attack → Analyse → Adjust  

A core feature of purple teaming is iteration. In a split-phase format, the red team performs a specific action (e.g. privilege escalation), then pauses. The blue team analyses detection performance, and both teams work together to adjust improve detection strategies before repeating. This cycle method helps teams build defensive muscle memory without the overwhelm.  

These exercises don’t require complex infrastructure or large teams. The key here is collaboration, relevance, and making sure every engagement result is atangible security improvement.  

While purple teaming offers value at almost any stage, there are certain inflection points where it becomes especially impactful for startups:  

Post-Series A, When Infrastructure Becomes More Complex  

After securing funding and expanding your technical stack, your attack surface grows. New integrations, cloud environments, and remote access increase exposure, making it an ideal time to assess how well your detection and response capabilities are keeping up.  

When Handling Sensitive Data or Preparing for Compliance  

If your business collects or processes personally identifiable information (PII), payment details, or health records, security expectations rise sharply. Purple teaming helps test whether your controls can detect and respond to realistic threats—useful preparation for frameworks like ISO 27001 or SOC 2, which emphasise monitoring, response, and continual improvement.  

Following a Penetration Test That Highlights Gaps  

A standard pen test might reveal exploitable weaknesses, but without visibility into how well they were detected or contained. Purple teaming fills that gap. By rerunning scenarios in a collaborative format, your team can pinpoint where alerts failed, what logs were missed, and how detection rules or processes can be improved.  

In short, if your startup is scaling, collecting sensitive data, or thinking about compliance and risk management, purple teaming provides a structured way to improve readiness without needing to pause your momentum. 

Startups thrive on iteration and purple teaming fits right in with that mindset. Rather than treating security as a one-off project, purple team exercises can be run regularly and be adapted to your evolving infrastructure, risks, and goals. 

Each engagement builds on the last, allowing your team to incrementally improve detection, response, and coordination. As your architecture scales, purple teaming can test new services, cloud deployments, or third-party integrations to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. 

This adaptive approach makes purple teaming a strategic fit for startups: it scales with you, strengthens resilience, and turns security into a driver of trust and not a blocker of progress.