Novee, a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity startup founded in May 2025 by offensive security veterans Ido Geffen (CEO), Gon Chalamish (CPO) and Omer Ninburg (CTO), has officially emerged from stealth with $51.5 million in funding led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners and Oren Zeev’s Zeev Ventures, marking one of the fastest funding trajectories in the offensive security space just four months after its inception, driven by strong customer interest and the urgency of AI-powered cyber threats. The company’s AI penetration testing platform is purpose-built to “think like a real attacker,” continuously simulating sophisticated tactics to uncover novel vulnerabilities including complex business logic flaws that traditional testing methods and generic tools often miss and delivers precise, automated fixes with retesting to ensure remediation, addressing the critical gap between machine-speed threats and episodic human-scale defense testing. “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,” said Robert Kugler, Head of Security, IT and Compliance at Cresta, highlighting how Novee’s solution enhances existing security programs.
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Rather than relying on general-purpose large language models, Novee uses a proprietary, purpose-trained AI model designed specifically for offensive security tasks, which has demonstrated performance advantages over leading frontier models in constrained web exploitation challenges, achieving higher accuracy and more meaningful real-world results. “Novee’s benchmarks show a clear performance advantage for their proprietary AI pentesting model over frontier LLMs,” said Tal Shapira, Ph.D., CTO at Reco AI, reinforcing the importance of specialized AI in this domain. Novee’s leadership team, with decades of elite offensive cyber experience, aims to shift cybersecurity from periodic penetration testing to continuous, intelligent defense, underscoring that “Attackers don’t wait for your annual pentest. Neither should your defense,” said Ido Geffen, co-founder and CEO of Novee; the company is already supporting customers across sectors and plans to expand its platform further to keep pace with the evolving AI-driven threat landscape.’
