Huskeys, a Tel Aviv startup building security tools for an internet increasingly run by autonomous software, said Tuesday it raised $27 million in a Series A round led by Blackstone Innovations Investments. The financing brings total funding to $35 million and values the company at more than $100 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The round included participation from Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures, Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel. Timing may matter here more than usual. AI agents now drive enough web traffic that telling legitimate automation apart from coordinated attacks has migrated from theoretical concern to a problem keeping chief information security officers awake at night.
Huskeys emerged from stealth approximately five months ago. Already it counts TikTok, Hugging Face, LEGOLAND, Ro and Blackstone among its customers, a roster that suggests the problem it's addressing resonates across industries.
A Layer Above the Stack
What Huskeys sells, it calls Network Edge Security Management. Think of it as a control layer that sits above the patchwork of content delivery networks, web application firewalls and cloud security tools most enterprises already run. The platform assesses security posture across those multi-vendor edge stacks, then generates policies tuned to specific business logic. It can apply virtual patches to vulnerabilities while engineering teams work on permanent fixes.
The company said it now analyzes more than one trillion web requests and thousands of network configurations each day, though it declined to break out which customers contribute what volume.
Huskeys explicitly targets what the industry calls "agentic traffic." These are the legitimate AI agents scraping sites, testing APIs, automating workflows. The distinction matters because traditional bot defense wasn't built for this. The product doesn't replace existing CDNs or WAFs. It orchestrates them, a nuance that could determine whether enterprises see it as essential or redundant.
Unit 8200 Roots
Co-founders Itai Gafni and Roy Weisfeld both served in Unit 8200, Israel's signals intelligence corps, where many of the country's cybersecurity startups trace their lineage. Gafni led AI initiatives during his service. Weisfeld focused on web security research. Forbes Israel named both to its 30 Under 30 list, recognition that arrived early in the company's life.
The startup was founded last year and emerged from stealth in late March with an $8 million seed round. Six months later, it's raising a Series A at what investors describe as a significant step-up valuation.
Strategic Bets and Integration Plans
Okta Ventures and Zscaler Ventures took strategic stakes in the round, with both companies planning deeper integrations that combine identity verification with network visibility. Those partnerships matter. Strategic investors don't just write checks; they open distribution channels and lend credibility in enterprise sales cycles where trust moves slowly.
As of September 2, 2026, Huskeys employs approximately 40 people and recently doubled headcount, according to the Times of Israel. The company is hiring across engineering and go-to-market roles in Tel Aviv and the United States, a geographic split common among Israeli startups chasing American enterprise buyers.
A Crowded Moment
Huskeys' announcement landed within 48 hours of two other AI security financings. HiddenLayer raised $100 million for AI model protection. AIR Security closed $50 million to build what it describes as a firewall for AI agents. In July, Hush Security raised $30 million for AI agent governance with Akamai as a strategic investor.
Incumbents are moving, too. Cloudflare recently announced it had integrated OpenAI's cyber models to draft WAF rules at the network edge. Zscaler unveiled Zero Trust controls for agentic AI this summer. The flurry of activity suggests venture capitalists and established security vendors alike believe a new category is forming, though whether the market can support this many players remains an open question.
What Comes Next
"Artificial intelligence has changed the way the internet operates, bringing enormous opportunities alongside new security risks and the potential for lost revenue," Gafni said in an interview with the Times of Israel. "We believe that in the near future, most identities operating on the web will be autonomous agents, and organizations will need a new infrastructure capable of identifying, securing and managing them."
That vision assumes a lot. It assumes enterprises will adopt AI agents at scale, that existing security tools won't adapt fast enough, and that a startup can navigate the long sales cycles and compliance requirements that come with selling into the enterprise security stack.
Adam Fletcher, chief information security officer at Blackstone, wrote that the investment marks Blackstone's first early-stage cybersecurity bet in Israel. "Huskeys has built a platform designed to operate at enterprise scale while advancing a new category for the modern network edge," Fletcher said. Strategic investors tend to speak optimistically in funding announcements, but Blackstone's willingness to put its name on the customer list and its balance sheet behind the round carries weight.
For now, Huskeys is betting that the shift toward autonomous software represents more than hype, and that enterprises will pay for tools purpose-built to manage it. Whether that thesis holds will likely become clear in the next 18 months, as the company scales sales and competitors sharpen their pitches.
