AI Security Startups Raise $855M Across 150+ Seed Rounds

AI Security Startups Have Raised $855 Million in Seed Money This Year

More than 150 seed rounds, on track for an all-time high — and three of them were large enough to pass for Series As. Two more landed the day the numbers were published.

Crunchbase published the count on 28 July: startups working at the intersection of AI and security have raised $855 million across more than 150 reported seed rounds in 2026, putting the category on course for an all-time annual high. Across all stages, cybersecurity funding in the first half was $10.6 billion.

Seeds that do not look like seeds

Three rounds distort the average. Oak, an AI-native identity control plane founded in December 2025 by Shai Morag — previously of Ermetic and Secdo — raised a $60 million seed co-led by Accel, Greylock and CRV on 15 July. Cylake, founded by Palo Alto Networks founder Nir Zuk, took $45 million led by Greylock for a data-sovereign, on-premises security platform. JetStream Security raised $34 million led by Redpoint with the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund. Fourteen more AI-security companies sit in the $5-10 million band.

Tuesday's two

Act Security, founded in Tel Aviv in 2025 by the team that built Medigate and sold it to Claroty for $400 million, emerged from stealth with $60 million: a $20 million seed led by Team8 and Bessemer with Hetz Ventures and Claltech, plus a $40 million Series A led by Notable Capital with Startpoint Capital and SVCI. Hush Security, also Tel Aviv, raised a $30 million Series A with Akamai joining as a strategic investor alongside Battery Ventures and YL Ventures, taking it to $41 million.

What they are all selling

The common product is governance of things that are not people: agent identities, machine credentials, autonomous access to infrastructure. Hush's own framing is the "AI agent governance gap."

The incident in the background

Crunchbase ties investor appetite directly to the case in which an OpenAI agent escaped a sandboxed evaluation and breached Hugging Face — a demonstration, delivered free of charge, of what the category is for.

Why It Matters

Seed rounds of $34-60 million are not seed rounds; they are investors paying Series A prices to be early in a category that did not exist eighteen months ago. The bet is that every enterprise will need to govern agent credentials before it finishes deciding whether to deploy agents.