While the Israeli tech sector seeks stability, the domestic cybersecurity industry continues to heat up with the announcement by Israeli cyber startup Oligo Security that it has completed a $60 million financing round.
The total capital raised by the company since its establishment in 2022 stands at approximately $140 million. The latest round was led by venture capital funds and investors Ballistic Ventures, Greenfield Partners, Red Dot Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and TLV Partners, along with Yasmin Lukatz and Eyal Waldman.
Oligo Security was founded by CEO Nadav Czerninski, CTO Gal Elbaz, and CPO Avshalom Hilu, who are childhood friends and veterans of IDF cyber units in Military Intelligence (Units 81 and 8200) and the C4I Corps (Matzgov). The company currently reports employing about 100 workers, 70 of whom are at its development center in Israel, with the remainder at its offices in New York and San Francisco.
Funding growth fuels global expansion
According to the company's announcement, the latest capital raise comes after increasing its annual recurring revenue (ARR) by more than 300% year-over-year, doubling its valuation since its Series B round, and expanding its operations. The additional capital is intended to accelerate product innovation and expand penetration into international markets.
Oligo provides runtime security for applications, cloud environments, and artificial intelligence systems, combining runtime monitoring with real-time protection. The platform it developed identifies which vulnerabilities are exploitable by observing code behavior as it occurs, detects malicious activity in real time, and blocks attack attempts without disrupting the production environment.
Exposing major cyber threats
In late May 2024, the company's researchers were the ones to expose one of the first cyberattacks targeting AI infrastructure, discovering that thousands of servers worldwide used for training and running AI systems were breached through a vulnerability that had gone undetected by security tools.
A more widely known security vulnerability was exposed by them about two months later, affecting the world's most popular browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. The vulnerability allowed a malicious website to bypass defense mechanisms and access services running on the user's computer or home network, information that should only have been accessible from within the computer itself. Following the report by the company's researchers, browser makers began updating their security mechanisms and blocking the attack vector.
Nadav Czerninski, co-founder and CEO of Oligo Security, said: "Organizations today face a new generation of attackers utilizing artificial intelligence who are capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities rapidly. As a result, the runtime environment has become the only place where attackers can be seen and stopped in real time. This is the future we have been building toward since our first day as a company."
Jake Seid, partner at Ballistic Ventures, added: "The runtime environment is where the business lives. It is where revenue is generated, customers interact with applications, and brand reputation is built or ruined. Oligo created protection for production environments without forcing organizations to choose between security and business continuity."
The funding announcement comes just one day after US credit card and digital payments company Visa announced the acquisition of Israeli company BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash, joining the approximately $2.6 billion raised since the beginning of the year by Israeli startups in the field.