Kai emerges from stealth with $125M to rebuild cybersecurity from scratch
What's the deal? San Jose-based Kai has emerged from stealth with $125 million in combined seed and Series A funding to build an agentic AI cybersecurity platform.
The round was led by Evolution Equity PartnersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, with participation from N47Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and other strategic investors. Just ten months old, the company has already signed multiple large enterprise customers across energy, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and hospitality, generating more than seven figures in bookings.
Kai was co-founded by Galina AntovaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, chief executive, who previously co-founded Claroty — the $3 billion industrial cybersecurity company that pioneered the security of cyber-physical systems — and chief technology officer Damiano BolzoniDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, who co-founded OT security firm SecurityMattersDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, later acquired by Forescout Technologies.
Why now? The founders' thesis is that the existing security industry, built around specialised point solutions and human-driven workflows, is structurally incapable of keeping pace with AI-powered attacks.
Rather than layering AI on top of existing tools, Kai has built a unified platform from scratch that uses autonomous agents to handle threat intelligence, exposure management, detection, and response as a single continuous pipeline — with no human in the loop for routine decisions.
What could go wrong? Kai is operating in one of the most crowded and well-funded sectors in tech. The same week it emerged from stealth, Armadin raised $190 million for a competing AI-native security approach.
Enterprises can be slow to rip out incumbent security stacks, and a platform that promises to replace entire tool categories faces a long and expensive sales cycle. The company's early traction is encouraging, but converting a pipeline into durable revenue at scale is a different challenge.
The signal: Kai's founding team is a telling detail. Antova and Bolzoni helped create the industrial cybersecurity category — Claroty and SecurityMatters both became significant businesses — and they are now betting that the category structure they helped build is itself obsolete.
The argument that AI makes tool silos untenable is gaining traction with investors: Kai, Armadin, and a string of other AI-native security startups have all raised large rounds in quick succession.
The underlying logic is the same in each case — that defenders need autonomous systems to match the speed and scale of AI-assisted attacks, and that none of the existing vendors are moving fast enough to get there.
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