Israeli startup Onit Security has raised $11 million to identify and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities with AI agents.
The Tel Aviv-based startup was founded in early 2025 to address a problem that Ofer Amitai, one of its cofounders, experienced firsthand at a previous company: a cyberattack stemming from a missed vulnerability.
In late 2020, a hacking group with ties to Iran breached Portnox, an Israeli security firm, and stole customer data.
“They didn’t use any super sophisticated attack,” Amitai, who was CEO of Portnox at the time, told Business Insider. The damage was “largely contained,” he said, but added that an incident like that “leaves scars on you.”
“When someone breaks into your house, I don’t think you carry on in the same way,” he said. “I don’t want any CISO to experience that feeling going forward.”
Amitai teamed up with fellow entrepreneurs and friends Elad Ben Meir and Tom Winter to build tools to help other companies spot the kind of vulnerabilities that led to the Portnox breach.
Ben Meir, the CEO of Onit, told Business Insider that AI agents running autonomously in the background have changed the game for businesses, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code for building and managing software.
“And it’s the same for cybersecurity,” he said. “Why not have agents that do the tasks that humans just don’t get to?”
AI agents are becoming an increasingly competitive part of the cybersecurity market, with startups such as Safe Security, Reco, and Bold deploying them in various ways to protect organizations.
Onit’s “fleet” of AI agents performs different tasks autonomously, such as collecting threat intelligence, understanding business context, like who owns an internal asset, and providing solutions, Ben Meir said. However, a human must always give final approval for the AI to implement a fix.
“There’s always still a human in the middle,” he said. “I think the market’s not quite ready yet for fully autonomous agents’ behavior.”
Onit provides its agents as a software-as-a-service model, with a tiered subscription if companies want to add more agents. The startup, which came out of stealth this week, says it is already working with about 15 Fortune 1000 customers. Ben Meir said it is focusing on larger companies with “complex environments,” such as financial institutions or manufacturers.
Onit’s seed funding round was led by Hetz Ventures and Brightmind Partners, and also drew investment from unnamed angel investors.
Onit said it plans to use the new funding to expand product development and go-to-market efforts as the company targets additional industries.
Here’s an exclusive look at the pitch deck Onit Security used to raise its $11 million seed round.
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