Cybersecurity startup Kai has emerged from stealth with US$125 million in funding, positioning itself at the center of a shift toward machine-speed defense as attackers increasingly leverage artificial intelligence to scale and accelerate attacks. The company’s agentic AI platform is designed to replace fragmented security tools and manual workflows with autonomous systems that can continuously analyze threats, manage exposures, and execute response actions across enterprise environments without human bottlenecks.
The launch reflects a broader industry inflection point where traditional, human-led security operations are struggling to keep pace with the speed and complexity of AI-driven threats, prompting a move toward fully integrated and automated security architectures. By unifying threat intelligence, detection, and remediation into a single pipeline, Kai aims to shift cybersecurity from reactive response to continuous, proactive defense, as enterprises grapple with tool sprawl, alert fatigue, and increasingly sophisticated attack campaigns.
Kai is led by proven founders who have built industry-defining companies. CEO Galina Antova previously co-founded Claroty, the $3 billion industrial cybersecurity leader that pioneered the security of cyber-physical systems. Kai CTO Damiano Bolzoni co-founded SecurityMatters, an OT cybersecurity company acquired by Forescout Technologies. Together, they helped converge IT and OT security, and now they are uniting cybersecurity, engineering, and enterprise IT.
Adversaries are leading with AI. Security teams are buried under fragmented tools, siloed data, and manual workflows that were never designed for this level of speed or complexity. Human-driven processes cannot keep pace with machine-speed attacks.
Over the years, as the industry specialized, more tool categories were created, each with silos of tools, teams, data, and workflows. More point solutions. More dashboards. Enterprises have been trying to balance depth in a single domain or breadth across many and getting neither fast enough to matter. The advances in agentic AI flipped the script.
Kai was founded on the belief that incremental improvements are no longer enough. It is not an upgrade to the existing security stack. It is a rebuild from first principles: a single agentic AI platform that does the actual security work, autonomously, continuously, across threat intelligence, exposure management, detection, response and beyond, as one unified pipeline with no silos, no boundaries, no human-speed bottlenecks.
“Cybersecurity is quickly becoming a contest between AI systems. The decisive factor is which side has richer data and can act at machine speed with human expert accuracy,” said Galina Antova, co-founder and CEO of Kai. “We’ve created a unified, agentic cybersecurity platform from the ground up. Kai replaces fragmentation with intelligent, autonomous agents that execute security work end-to-end: across multiple use cases, and we’re just getting started.”
Kai is not another security tool wrapped around Large Language Models. It is an agentic AI platform built by PhD- and postdoctoral-level AI researchers, as well as category-defining operators at the forefront of the latest Generative AI wave.
In just 10 months since the first line of code was written, Kai has already signed multiple large customers, generating more than seven figures in bookings and an impressive pipeline. Adoption spans multiple verticals, including energy, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and hospitality.
Kai’s early traction in the energy sector is reflected in its acceptance into and graduation from the Chevron Technology Ventures (CTV) Catalyst Program. The program focuses on accelerating the maturation of technologies with the potential to improve Chevron’s base business operations. Meeting every Catalyst Program milestone supports the capabilities of the Kai Agentic Platform and its ability to deliver measurable outcomes in one of the most demanding and complex operating environments in the world.
“AI has ushered in a new era for cybersecurity, disrupting traditional defense while enabling new, automated attacks humans alone can’t match,” said Richard Seewald, Founder and Managing Partner, Evolution Equity Partners. “Kai’s approach was designed to close that gap by letting agentic AI prioritize action and execute response. That shift is why we backed Kai, and why enterprises are moving quickly to adopt it.”
Kai’s vision extends beyond security. Just as its founders previously helped converge IT and OT cybersecurity, the company aims to become the AI-powered operating system that unites every cybersecurity and IT function, enabling organizations to operate at machine speed across the entire enterprise.
“Attackers don’t think in categories,” said Bolzoni. “Defense shouldn’t either. Kai allows enterprises to eliminate silos, transform entire security functions, and reduce risk faster than was ever possible with human-led workflows.”
The $125 million in funding will accelerate go-to-market expansion, deepen AI research, and scale the platform to meet growing global demand.
