Novee, an AI offensive security startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has officially launched following a successful stealth phase, securing $51.5 million in total funding. The company aims to combat the increasing threat of AI-enabled cyberattacks through continuous, AI-driven penetration testing.
The funding round was led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures. Notably, Novee closed its Series A financing within just four months of its founding in May 2025—a rapid accomplishment in the offensive security sector, attributed to early customer traction and the urgent need among enterprises to defend against automated, machine-speed attackers.
Novee is positioning its platform as a significant departure from traditional, episodic penetration tests and scanner-style automation. The company argues that conventional approaches often leave gaps in production environments as software evolves continuously. Its system simulates real attacker tactics throughout the entire process, from validating exploits to automated retesting. The goal is to ensure that critical vulnerabilities are not only identified but adequately remediated.
The startup differentiates itself through a purpose-trained, patent-pending AI model specifically designed for offensive security, rather than relying on general-purpose large language models (LLMs). Novee asserts that its model, trained on real-world exploitation techniques, tools, and workflows, has outperformed leading LLMs, including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Sonnet, by more than 55% on constrained web exploitation challenges. The accuracy of Novee’s model reached up to 90%, whereas general models typically plateau at around 65%.
Novee was co-founded by Ido Geffen (CEO), Gon Chalamish (CPO), and Omer Ninburg (CTO), all of whom have extensive backgrounds in offensive security from elite Israel Defense Force cyber programs. The startup has already helped organizations identify hundreds of novel vulnerabilities and continuously fix them across various sectors, including financial services, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing.
In a statement, Robert Kugler, Head of Security, IT and Compliance at Cresta, noted, “Traditional DAST tools struggled to surface issues that actually matter to us. We needed testing that could identify more complex vulnerabilities, like server-side request forgery, which scanners just aren’t capable of detecting. Novee filled that gap by consistently uncovering higher-quality findings that we simply weren’t seeing before.”
Tal Shapira, Ph.D., CTO of Reco AI, commented on Novee’s performance benchmarks, stating, “Novee’s benchmarks show a clear performance advantage for their proprietary AI pentesting model over frontier LLMs. Because success is measured through live exploit execution rather than proxy metrics, the results are particularly strong and methodologically sound. From an AI research perspective, this reinforces a broader truth: penetration testing is an adversarial, environment-driven problem, and purpose-trained models will consistently outperform general-purpose language models in this domain.”
Ido Geffen emphasized the urgency for continuous cybersecurity measures, remarking, “Attackers don’t wait for your annual pentest. Neither should your defense. What security teams actually need are high-signal findings they can trust: novel vulnerabilities that are proven exploitable. Novee has already helped organizations uncover hundreds of these novel vulnerabilities and fix them continuously, closing gaps before attackers exploit them.”
Yoav Leitersdorf, Managing Partner at YL Ventures, expressed confidence in Novee’s vision and rapid adoption, stating, “What convinced us wasn’t just the vision; it was the urgency of the moment and the speed of real-world adoption. As cybersecurity enters an AI-driven arms race, enterprises need continuous penetration testing—and Novee is delivering exactly that. In just a few months, the team has strategic customers across financial services, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing. We’re excited to back a team with deep expertise, strong product-market fit and the potential to define this category.”
Novee’s entry into the cybersecurity landscape underscores a pivotal shift towards proactive defense mechanisms, reflecting broader trends in technology where AI capabilities are rapidly evolving. As the threat landscape becomes increasingly sophisticated, the need for advanced security solutions like Novee’s is likely to grow, positioning the company as a critical player in the ongoing battle against cyber threats.
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