Daylight raises $80M to turn AI agents into the new frontline of cybersecurity

Daylight Security has raised $80 million in a Series B round led by Goldman Sachs’ Growth Equity, valuing the AI-powered managed security startup at $120 million in total funding. The company claims its AI agents have driven over 40-fold revenue growth in the past year, a figure it attributes to a model where security engineers deploy specialized AI agents tailored to each customer’s infrastructure—handling routine threats at machine speed while reserving human judgment for edge cases.

The funding follows a year of rapid scaling. Daylight’s Series A, led by Craft Ventures, closed at $33 million just three months after a $7 million seed round, according to SiliconANGLE. Now, with Bain Capital Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, and Maple Capital returning, the company is doubling down on a vision where AI doesn’t just augment security operations but *replaces* much of the manual work. That’s a bet that resonates in an era where cybersecurity teams are drowning in alerts—65% of professionals surveyed by ISC2 last month said they now spend more time vetting AI-generated security signals than they did a year ago.

Daylight’s product works by embedding AI agents into a customer’s environment, where they monitor for threats across endpoints, cloud, and identity systems. An alert about a security risk in an internal tool is treated the same as a phishing attempt or unusual activity. The company claims it detects threats in seconds and contains them in minutes, a claim that positions it directly against traditional providers, which it says can take significantly longer. Customers like Miro, LastPass, and Rogo Technologies are already using the platform, though Daylight’s co-founder and CEO Hagai Shapira emphasized that human engineers remain central: they design the agents, govern their behavior, and step in when context or nuance demands it.

The funding will fuel expansion into Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific, as well as hiring for security engineering and product development. Shapira’s background—former intelligence officer and early leader in security automation—hints at Daylight’s roots in reducing operational friction. But where past efforts focused on efficiency, Daylight is betting on a future where AI doesn’t just flag risks but *acts* on them, under human supervision. That’s a narrower niche than some competitors, but one that aligns with a growing trend: treating AI agents as first-class security assets rather than just tools.

The market for this is heating up. As we noted in September, startups are racing to secure automated systems from misuse or exploitation. Daylight’s advantage may lie in its focus on *managed* security—offering customers three deployment models, from full outsourcing to hybrid teams—rather than just selling software. That aligns with a shift in how enterprises think about security: not as a perimeter to defend, but as an operational function to automate.

What to watch next: Daylight’s ability to prove its speed claims at scale, and whether its AI agents can handle the "gray zones" of security—where context matters more than rules. The company’s next move will likely be demonstrating how its agents evolve alongside threats, not just react to them. If it succeeds, it could redefine what a security operations center looks like. If not, the $80 million will test how long investors are willing to wait for AI to replace humans in cybersecurity.

Sources: siliconangle.com