Novee has emerged from stealth with $51.5m in total funding, marking one of the fastest early-stage funding trajectories seen in the cybersecurity sector.
The funding round was led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners and Oren Zeev through Zeev Ventures, backing the company less than four months after its founding as investor interest accelerated alongside growing concerns around AI-powered cyber threats.
Founded to address the widening gap between increasingly automated attacks and largely human-paced security testing, Novee has developed an AI-driven penetration testing platform designed to simulate the behaviour of real-world attackers. As organisations deploy software continuously, Novee positions its technology as a way to move penetration testing from periodic exercises to a continuous security capability. The platform is built to identify novel vulnerabilities, including complex business logic flaws that typically evade traditional scanners and automated tools.
The company says the new capital will be used to scale product development, expand its engineering and research teams, and support customer growth across sectors including financial services, healthcare, technology and manufacturing, as demand rises for security testing that can keep pace with AI-enabled attackers.
Unlike many competitors that rely on general-purpose large language models, Novee has built a proprietary, purpose-trained and patent-pending AI model specifically for offensive security. The company claims its model significantly outperforms frontier LLMs on constrained web exploitation challenges by focusing on live exploit execution rather than proxy benchmarks, enabling higher-confidence remediation of security gaps.
Cresta head of security, IT and compliance Robert Kugler said, “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.”
Reco AI CTO Tal Shapira said, “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.”
Novee co-founder and CEO Ido Geffen said, “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.”
YL Ventures managing partner Yoav Leitersdorf said, “Novee is built by a team that has spent decades operating at the highest levels of offensive cyber and critical infrastructure defense. 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.”
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