Novee, an AI offensive security firm, has launched from stealth with a total funding of $51.5 million, led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Oren Zeev (Zeev Ventures), to address the escalating pace of AI-powered cyberattacks with continuous, AI-driven penetration testing. The company secured its Series A round within four months of its founding, driven by rapid customer traction and an elite team specializing in AI research and offensive cybersecurity. This rapid funding trajectory reflects the growing urgency as AI-powered cyberattacks accelerate, automating reconnaissance, continuously probing systems, and weaponizing weaknesses faster than human defenders can respond.
Traditional security testing, such as penetration testing, remains largely tied to human-scale workflows or relies on superficial automation. This creates dangerous blind spots within production environments, as adversaries can exploit vulnerabilities in the time it takes a human tester to open a ticket. Novee aims to close this gap by transforming advanced offensive tradecraft into a continuous, AI-driven penetration testing platform that simulates the sophisticated tactics of real-world hackers.
The platform is designed to uncover novel vulnerabilities, including complex business logic flaws that were previously only detectable by highly skilled manual penetration testers. From initial exploit validation to automated retesting, Novee offers an end-to-end loop that confirms critical risks are not only identified but also permanently removed.
Robert Kugler, Head of Security, IT and Compliance at Cresta, noted that “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.”
Novee distinguishes itself by utilizing a proprietary, purpose-trained, and patent-pending AI model specifically developed for offensive security. This model, trained on real-world exploitation techniques, tools, and workflows, has demonstrated significant performance advantages. It outperformed frontier LLMs, such as Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Sonnet, by over 55% on constrained web exploitation challenges, achieving up to 90% accuracy where general-purpose models typically plateau at around 65%.
Tal Shapira, Ph.
D., CTO at Reco AI, commented on these benchmarks, stating, “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.”
Ido Geffen, co-founder and CEO of Novee, emphasized the need for continuous defense, stating, “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.”
Novee was founded in May 2025 by Ido Geffen (CEO), Gon Chalamish (CPO), and Omer Ninburg (CTO), who are veteran offensive security leaders from the Israel Defense Force’s elite cyber programs and have led nation-state–level offensive security operations.
Yoav Leitersdorf, Managing Partner at YL Ventures, highlighted the team’s expertise: “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.”
Joydeep Bhattacharyya, General Partner at Canaan Ventures, added, “What convinced us wasn’t just the vision; it was the urgency of the moment and the speed of real-world adoption. As cybersecurity enters an AI-driven arms race, enterprises need continuous penetration testing—and Novee is delivering exactly that. In just a few months, the team has strategic customers across financial services, healthcare, technology and manufacturing. We’re excited to back a team with deep expertise, strong product-market fit and the potential to define this category.”
Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Novee aims to provide continuous security for constantly changing environments against machine-speed attackers.
