Novee, an AI offensive security startup based in Tel Aviv, Israel, has launched out of stealth with $51.5 million in total funding as it targets the rise of AI-enabled cyberattacks with continuous, AI-driven penetration testing.
The company said the financing was led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners and Oren Zeev (Zeev Ventures), and that it closed its Series A within four months of founding—an unusually fast timeline in offensive security that it attributed to early customer traction and growing urgency among enterprises facing automated, machine-speed attackers.
Novee is positioning its platform as a shift away from episodic penetration tests and scanner-style automation, arguing that traditional approaches leave gaps in production environments as software changes continuously. The company said its system simulates real attacker tactics end-to-end, from validating exploits through automated retesting, with the goal of confirming that critical issues are not only identified but fully remediated.
The startup also claims differentiation through a purpose-trained, patent-pending AI model built specifically for offensive security, rather than relying on general-purpose large language models. Novee said its model, trained on real-world exploitation techniques, tools and workflows, outperformed frontier LLMs including Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Sonnet by more than 55% on constrained web exploitation challenges, reaching up to 90% accuracy where general models “typically plateau” at around 65%.
Novee was founded in May 2025 by Ido Geffen (CEO), Gon Chalamish (CPO) and Omer Ninburg (CTO), who the company described as veteran offensive security leaders from elite Israel Defense Force cyber programs. The company said it has already helped organizations uncover hundreds of novel vulnerabilities and fix them continuously, and it cited adoption across sectors including financial services, healthcare, technology, and manufacturing.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
Robert Kugler, Head of Security, IT and Compliance, Cresta
“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.”
Tal Shapira, Ph.D., CTO, Reco AI
“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.”
Ido Geffen, Co-Founder and CEO, Novee
“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.”
Yoav Leitersdorf, Managing Partner, YL Ventures
“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.”
Joydeep Bhattacharyya, General Partner, Canaan Ventures
