Israeli-founded cybersecurity startup Surf AI launched on Tuesday with $57 million in funding, saying it aims to help enterprise security teams continuously identify and close security exposure gaps through an AI-driven operations platform.
The funding round was led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Cyberstarts and Boldstart Ventures. Surf AI said the capital would be used to expand product development, grow its team, and support broader enterprise adoption, as Israeli cyber firms continue to attract major investor backing amid a wider surge in sector fundraising.
Founded in 2024, the company was established by a group of veterans of Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem: Yair Grindlinger, Elad Horn, Roie Cohen Duwek, Avner Gideoni, and Brenton Gumucio.
Why Surf AI says security teams need a new model
Surf AI entered the market at a time when security teams are under growing pressure to manage increasingly complex environments spanning cloud infrastructure, identity systems, SaaS platforms, business applications, data tools, and internal IT workflows. The company argued that while the threat landscape has become more dynamic, much of the actual security work inside enterprises remains fragmented across disconnected teams and tools.
According to the company, its platform is designed to pull signals from identity, cloud, security, data, HR, and IT systems into what it calls a living context graph, giving organizations a more complete picture of assets, permissions, owners, and dependencies across the business. It then uses specialized AI agents, with human oversight, to prioritize risks based on business impact and coordinate remediation steps.
“We built Surf AI to operationalize the entire security program with AI,” Surf AI co-founder and CEO Yair Grindlinger said in a statement. “Our platform is designed to continuously find and close the exposure gaps that teams have always known about but did not have the time or resources to address.”
Grindlinger added that Surf AI was built to connect security context, drive remediation, and keep human teams in control throughout the process.
Investors bet on AI-driven security execution
Accel partner Philippe Botteri said the company was betting on a structural shift in how security teams will need to operate as attacks become faster and more sophisticated.
“AI is dramatically increasing the speed and sophistication of attackers, and security teams need fundamentally new operating models to keep up,” Botteri said. He said Surf AI was building an agentic platform designed to improve the productivity of security teams and help organizations adapt to a more aggressive threat environment.
Cyberstarts founder Gili Raanan said his firm first backed the team at seed stage because the founders had already helped scale a cybersecurity business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. He said Surf AI was now building a platform suited to a world in which defenders also need AI systems that can reason, adapt, and operate at enterprise scale.
Boldstart Ventures founder and general partner Ed Sim framed the startup as a response to a more practical problem facing chief information security officers: the need to reduce risk with limited staff and tighter budgets.
“Security leaders are under pressure to reduce risk continuously with fewer resources,” Sim said. “Too many enterprises are spending heavily on tools that only address problems on the surface.”
Early deployments and hiring plans
Across early deployments, Surf AI said its platform helped organizations recover nearly $1 million in excess SaaS license spending, disable thousands of dormant and orphaned accounts, address certificate-related risks, and automate identity enforcement workflows across enterprise users.
Erik Hart, chief information security officer at Cushman & Wakefield, said the platform had helped his organization lower risk and improve efficiency in a short period of time.
“It’s helped us operate continuously at scale, lower risk, optimize costs, and improve our security posture, producing measurable ROI in weeks,” Hart said.
Surf AI said it is actively onboarding enterprise technology clients, including global companies and Fortune 500 organizations, and is hiring engineers and security leaders in both the US and Israel.