Novee, a cybersecurity startup specializing in artificial intelligence–driven offensive security, emerged from stealth mode Wednesday with $51.5 million in funding. The investment was led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners and Zeev Ventures.
The company raised its Series A just four months after its founding in May 2025, marking one of the fastest funding trajectories in the offensive security sector. Novee attributed the pace to strong customer interest, a team with deep expertise in AI research and offensive cybersecurity, and growing concerns over increasingly automated cyberattacks.
Novee’s platform uses AI to simulate the tactics of real-world hackers, offering continuous penetration testing that detects advanced vulnerabilities. It focuses on identifying complex business logic flaws and delivering automated retesting to ensure critical risks are resolved.
“Attackers don’t wait for your annual pentest, and neither should your defense,” said Novee co-founder and CEO Ido Geffen. “Novee has already helped organizations uncover hundreds of these novel vulnerabilities and fix them continuously, closing gaps before attackers exploit them.”
Unlike platforms that rely on generic AI models, Novee developed a proprietary AI system trained specifically on offensive security data and techniques. The company said its model outperformed leading large language models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Sonnet by more than 55% in web exploitation tasks, achieving 90% accuracy.
“Penetration testing is an adversarial, environment-driven problem,” said Tal Shapira, CTO at Reco AI. “Purpose-trained models will consistently outperform general-purpose language models in this domain.”
Customers including enterprise software firm Cresta praised the platform’s ability to uncover hard-to-detect vulnerabilities. “We needed testing that could identify more complex vulnerabilities, like server-side request forgery, which scanners just aren’t capable of detecting,” said Robert Kugler, Cresta’s head of security. “Novee filled that gap.”
Novee was founded by Geffen, Gon Chalamish (chief product officer) and Omer Ninburg (chief technology officer), all of whom served in elite cyber units within the IDF. The company is based in Tel Aviv.
“Novee is built by a team that has spent decades operating at the highest levels of offensive cyber and critical infrastructure defense,” said Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner at YL Ventures. “They understand how real attackers think because they have done this work themselves, at scale and under real-world constraints. What they are building reflects a deep understanding of how AI is reshaping the balance between attack and defense. As AI changes the speed and nature of attacks, offensive security becomes a continuous capability, not a periodic exercise. Novee is executing on that shift with rare technical rigor and conviction.”
