Novee has emerged from stealth with $51.5m in total funding, positioning itself as a specialist provider of tools designed to counter the accelerating threat of AI-powered cyberattacks.
The $51.5m raise was led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners and Oren Zeev through Zeev Ventures. The Series A round was completed within four months of the company’s founding, marking one of the fastest funding trajectories seen in the offensive security segment, according to the company.
Founded to address the growing gap between the speed of modern software deployment and the slower, episodic nature of traditional security testing, Novee is focused on automating elite-level offensive security techniques. As attackers increasingly use AI to automate reconnaissance and exploit vulnerabilities at machine speed, the company argues that conventional penetration testing and generic automation tools are no longer sufficient to protect production environments.
Novee’s platform converts advanced offensive tradecraft into continuous, AI-driven penetration testing that simulates the tactics of real-world hackers. The company says its technology can uncover novel vulnerabilities, including complex business logic flaws that have historically required highly skilled manual penetration testers to detect. The platform also supports automated validation and retesting, helping organisations ensure vulnerabilities are not only identified but permanently fixed.
The new funding will be used to accelerate product development, expand the company’s engineering and research teams, and support growing customer demand across sectors including financial services, healthcare, technology and manufacturing. Novee also plans to invest further in its proprietary AI models, which are purpose-built for offensive security rather than adapted from general-purpose large language models.
While many AI-based security tools rely on generic models optimised for text and reasoning, Novee has developed a patent-pending, purpose-trained AI model designed specifically for exploitation workflows. The company claims its model outperformed frontier LLMs such as Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Sonnet by more than 55% on constrained web exploitation challenges, achieving accuracy levels of up to 90%.
“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,” Cresta head of security, IT and compliance Robert Kugler said.
“Novee’s benchmarks show a clear performance advantage for their proprietary AI pentesting model over frontier LLMs,” Reco AI CTO Tal Shapira said. “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.”
“Attackers don’t wait for your annual pentest. Neither should your defense,” Novee CEO Ido Geffen said. “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, Gon Chalamish and Omer Ninburg, all veterans of elite cyber units within the Israel Defense Force. Investors backing the round said the team’s background in nation-state-level offensive operations was a key factor in their decision.
“What convinced us wasn’t just the vision; it was the urgency of the moment and the speed of real-world adoption,” Canaan Ventures general partner Joydeep Bhattacharyya said. “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.”
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