Imagine getting a phone call in the middle of the night telling you a hospital full of patients just lost access to life-saving records because someone halfway across the world clicked “execute” on a piece of malicious code. That actually happened in Israel a few years ago, and it changed everything for one particular team of cybersecurity experts.
Out of that nightmare came a company that just convinced some of the sharpest investors in Silicon Valley to hand over another $60 million – bringing their total war chest to $130 million in just three years. And the reason? Artificial intelligence has turned cybercrime from a nasty annoyance into an existential threat moving at machine speed.
The New Arms Race Nobody Saw Coming
Let’s be honest – most of us still think of hackers as hoodie-wearing geniuses typing furiously in dark rooms. The reality in 2025 couldn’t be more different. Today’s attackers use generative AI that writes perfect phishing emails in seconds, finds vulnerabilities nobody knew existed, and adapts the moment a defense appears.
In my experience covering this space, I’ve never seen security leaders this nervous. One CISO of a Fortune 100 company told me privately last month: “We’re not fighting humans anymore. We’re fighting algorithms that never sleep.” That’s the battlefield this latest funding round is arming against.
From Hospital Crisis to Startup Mission
The origin story reads like something Hollywood would reject as too dramatic. After investigating that devastating hospital ransomware attack, three veterans of Israel’s elite cyber units sat down and asked a simple but brutal question: why did this happen when all the security tools were actually doing their job?
The answer was painful. Every system had spotted something suspicious – but none of them were talking to each other. The alerts got buried. The attack succeeded. In that moment, they decided to build something that would force all those disconnected tools to work as a single, intelligent organism.
“All the data was there. If the security tools had just been communicating properly, the attack would have been blocked automatically.”
– Co-founder reflecting on the hospital incident
Who’s Writing the Checks (and Why It Matters)
The latest round was led by Menlo Ventures, with heavy hitters Sequoia Capital and Cyberstarts joining in. If those names sound familiar, they should. Cyberstarts was an early believer in another Israeli startup that Google just acquired for $32 billion earlier this year.
These aren’t casual investors throwing money at hype. They’re the same people who backed the companies that basically invented modern cybersecurity. When they write nine-figure checks, the rest of the industry pays attention.
- Tripled annual recurring revenue since September 2024
- Total funding now at $130 million since 2022 founding
- Customers already include healthcare providers, banks, and Fortune 500 giants
- Platform uses AI and automation to orchestrate existing security tools
The Unit 8200 Magic – Why Israel Keeps Producing Cyber Unicorns
There’s a reason Israeli cybersecurity companies keep selling for billions. It starts with mandatory military service and one particular signals intelligence unit that’s basically the Harvard of cyber warfare.
Graduates from this unit have founded or led some of the biggest names in the industry. Think of it as the ultimate startup accelerator – except instead of free coffee and pitch practice, you get real-world experience stopping nation-state attackers before breakfast.
The CEO herself spent 15 years in this environment before leading major investigations for two of the biggest threat intelligence firms in the world. That kind of resume isn’t just impressive on paper – it’s battlefield-tested credibility that enterprise customers pay serious money for.
What “Threat Exposure Management” Actually Means in 2025
Forget everything you think you know about traditional security approaches. The old model was: buy twenty different tools, hope they catch bad stuff, and pray your team notices the important alerts among the millions of false positives.
The new reality requires something completely different. Modern platforms have to:
- Automatically discover every asset an organization has (including ones IT forgot about)
- Continuously assess which vulnerabilities actually matter right now
- Orchestrate all existing security tools to fix problems without human intervention
- Prioritize based on actual business risk, not just technical severity
- Adapt in real time as attackers change tactics
This isn’t just nicer dashboards. It’s the difference between playing whack-a-mole and having a coordinated immune system for your entire digital infrastructure.
Why Healthcare and Finance Are Writing Checks First
Some industries can’t afford to be the cautionary tale. After watching hospitals turn away ambulances during ransomware attacks, healthcare systems are particularly motivated. One major health network reportedly told vendors: “Show me how you would have stopped what happened to that Israeli hospital.”
Financial services aren’t far behind. When every millisecond of downtime costs millions and regulators are watching like hawks, the math becomes simple. Spending eight figures on prevention beats losing nine figures in a breach – plus the priceless hit to customer trust.
The Bigger Picture: We’re All in This Fight
Here’s what keeps me up at night: the same AI tools making defenders smarter are making attackers more dangerous. Every advance in defensive AI gets reverse-engineered by criminal groups within months. Sometimes weeks.
This funding round matters because it’s not just another startup story. It’s evidence that the good guys are finally investing at the scale required to keep up. But make no mistake – this is now a permanent arms race where falling behind by even six months can be catastrophic.
The hospital that inspired this company eventually recovered, but others haven’t been so lucky. As AI continues democratizing offensive capabilities to anyone with a laptop and bad intentions, stories like this become more important than ever.
Perhaps the most telling detail? They’re already hiring aggressively. Because in this particular war, the side that can attract and keep the best human talent – the ones who can stay one step ahead of machines teaching other machines how to attack us – wins.
The next time someone tells you AI is just about chatbots and image generators, remember this: out there right now, intelligence operatives turned entrepreneurs are burning midnight oil to make sure the technology that writes poetry today doesn’t end civilization tomorrow.
And they just got sixty million more reasons to keep fighting.
