FundraiseSep 2, 2026, 15:28 UTC

Blackstone leads $27M round for Israeli cyber startup Huskeys

What's the deal? Israeli cybersecurity startup Huskeys has raised $27 million in an early-stage round led by Blackstone, bringing total funding to $35 million. Skinos Ventures, Shlomo Kramer's Yishay Yovel fund, the venture arms of Okta and Zscaler, and Merlin Ventures also joined.

What's the endgame? Huskeys operates at the web application firewall (WAF) layer, a security technology developed in Israel nearly 30 years ago that it argues has barely changed since. Its platform adds an agentic AI layer to that infrastructure, adapting it for an internet increasingly shaped by autonomous AI agents.

Why now? The company left stealth five months ago. "Artificial intelligence has changed the way the internet works, and along with tremendous opportunities, it has also brought new security risks," said co-founder and chief executive officer Itai Gafni.

What's next? The investments from Okta and Zscaler come with strategic partnerships aimed at deepening integration between security tools and accelerating Huskeys' growth. Customers already include TikTok, Legoland, Ro, Hugging Face, and Blackstone itself.

Founded by Gafni and chief technology officer Roy Weissfeld, both alumni of Israel's Unit 8200, the startup also drew private backers including executives from Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point. Actor Assi Cohen and mentalist Lior Suchard, who advises the company, also invested.

The signal: At $27 million, the round sits in the 95th percentile of all-time early-stage security deals in the US, a sign of investor appetite for tools built for a web run by AI agents.