Three and a half years after it was founded, Israeli AI cyber defense unicorn Dream Security has more than doubled its value to $3 billion, after raising $260 million in its latest private funding round announced on Thursday.

To date, the company has secured a total of $412 million from investors to build AI infrastructure geared to help governments and critical national infrastructure sites — like oil, water, and energy facilities — secure and protect their most sensitive data from sophisticated cyber attacks by bad actors, including Russia, Iran, North Korea, and China. Dream last raised capital in a secondary offering at a valuation of $1.3 billion in August last year, following a $100 million investment last February at $1.1 billion.

“We started three and a half years ago with the vision that the next cyber warfare is going to be AI versus AI and not human versus human anymore,” Dream Security CEO Shalev Hulio told The Times of Israel. “A year ago, we realized that the bad guys of the world — the Chinese, the Russians, North Koreans, the Iranians — are abusing AI to find the weakest link in every country or in every critical asset in order to penetrate it.”

“We believe that the next supernations are going to be countries that know how to secure their national data and leverage cyber, AI and quantum [computing],” Hulio said.

Dream Security was founded in January 2023 by Hulio, months after he stepped down as CEO of embattled cyber espionage firm NSO Group, which he co-founded; former chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz; and Gil Dolev, founder and former CEO of Wayout Group, an intelligence-gathering company focused on IoT (Internet of Things) devices.

Based in Tel Aviv and with offices in Vienna and Abu Dhabi, the startup said it has built an AI-native national cyber defense platform to defend against nation-state cyber threats; an autonomous AI security researcher that discovers vulnerabilities and helps governments........

© The Times of Israel