Sonae invests in company of former members of Israel's "secret services". Bright Pixel, the venture capital investment arm of the group led by Cláudia Azevedo, participated in the Series A funding round of 23.3 million euros of the Israeli cybersecurity company Huskeys. Itai Gafni and Roy Weisfeld, former members of Unit 8200 - Israel's elite surveillance division -, founded the cybersecurity company Huskeys in Tel Aviv, in January last year, which aims to transform the way organizations manage and protect increasingly complex digital infrastructures. After a seed round of eight million dollars (6.9 million euros, at current exchange rates), Huskeys has now completed a Series A funding round of 27 million dollars (23.3 million euros), which included the participation of Bright Pixel Capital, the technology investment arm of the Sonae group. This funding brings the total raised by Huskeys to 35 million dollars (30.2 million euros) "and will accelerate the development of its Network Edge Security Management platform, designed to respond to the growing complexity of network environments and the new security challenges driven by AI," explains Bright Pixel Capital, in a statement. "Organizations are managing increasingly complex and fragmented technological environments, at a time when artificial intelligence is also transforming traffic and cyber threats," and Huskeys "presents a differentiating approach to this problem, by enabling unified security management across existing technologies," stresses Marcos de Castro Osório, director of Bright Pixel Capital. "We believe in the relevance and distinction of this approach and are very pleased to support the team in this new growth phase in a crucial category in cybersecurity," concludes the same manager of the subsidiary of the group led by Cláudia Azevedo. The investment in Huskeys reinforces Bright Pixel Capital's strategy of "investing in technology companies that are developing differentiating solutions to respond to emerging needs in the cybersecurity area," which has more than 50 direct investments, including stakes in companies on a global scale, from early stages to growth stages, and in strategic business areas such as cybersecurity, "infrastructure software," retail technology, "business applications," and emerging technologies. The round was led by Blackstone Innovations Investments and also included Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures and SV Angel, as well as individual investors, including Eran Reshef, inventor of WAF and CAPTCHA, and executives from organizations such as Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, Google, Microsoft and Intel. Among Huskeys' clients are global brands such as TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Blackstone and Hugging Face. The Israeli platform, Bright Pixel guarantees, already analyzes more than one billion web requests and thousands of network configurations in organizations from different geographies daily. "We founded Huskeys because security teams are being asked to protect digital infrastructures with increasingly wider and more complex perimeters, with tools that were never designed to work together or to respond to the challenges of the new AI era. Today, every business depends on its network infrastructure and the perimeter where customers, revenues and threats intersect," stresses Itai Gafni. "As AI transforms both legitimate traffic and cyberattacks, organizations need an intelligence layer capable of continuously understanding what is happening and adapting security in real time, so that the digital infrastructure perimeter works in favor of the business and not against it. That is the category we are building," emphasizes the CEO and co-founder of Huskeys. (News updated at 14:21)

Huskeys lands $27M Series A as Blackstone Innovations Investments backs a new Edge Security category. FinanceWire Sep. 2, 2026, 08:35 AM Tel Aviv, Israel, September 2nd, 2026, FinanceWire The Wall Street Journal first reported that Huskeys has closed a $27 million Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments, capital that lifts the company's total funding to $35 million and puts real weight behind a category that did not have a name until recently. Huskeys is building what it calls Network Edge Security Management, or NESM, a unified intelligence and control layer that sits across the modern network edge. The New York City company follows an $8 million seed round with this raise, and the investor list reads like a map of the people who built the previous generation of edge security products. The syndicate says something about the thesis. Blackstone Innovations Investments led. Merlin Ventures joined. So did Skinos Ventures, the firm founded by Shlomo Kramer and Yishay Yovel, who pioneered the WAF and SASE categories. Zscaler Ventures and Okta Ventures both participated, as did Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel. The angel list matters just as much. Eran Reshef, who invented both the WAF and the CAPTCHA, put money in. So did executives from Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Intel. When the people who built WAFs, CDNs, and hyperscale cloud infrastructure all write checks into a company proposing a management layer above their creations, the signal is difficult to ignore. Strategic investors from Zscaler and Okta suggest that incumbents see Huskeys as complementary rather than competitive. That is consistent with how the platform is designed. It orchestrates existing infrastructure instead of displacing it. The customer base arrived before the Series A. Huskeys already counts TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Blackstone, and Hugging Face among its customers. That mix spans social media at planetary scale, physical entertainment venues, digital health, financial services, and open source AI infrastructure. Very few of those companies share an architecture, which is arguably the point. The volume numbers give a sense of the surface area involved. Huskeys analyzes more than a trillion web requests and thousands of network configurations every day across organizations worldwide. A trillion requests daily is the kind of throughput that makes a data model either a genuine asset or an expensive liability, and the company has staked its architecture on the former. Why the edge needs a management layer. Modern organizations secure applications across an expanding mix of cloud providers, Content Delivery Networks, Web Application Firewalls, and other edge services. Each of those tools has its own policy language, its own telemetry format, and its own operational assumptions. Stack five or six of them together across multiple clouds and the result is an environment where the security team owns the outcome but no single console owns the picture. AI is now changing the traffic flowing through that environment from both directions. Autonomous agents are becoming legitimate users of applications, arriving with access patterns that look nothing like a browser session. On the other side, attackers are using AI to discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster than before. Developments such as Mythos demonstrate how AI-driven capabilities are accelerating the speed and scale of cyber threats. The trajectory is clear. Non-human traffic is expected to account for 70 percent of all web traffic by 2027. Security architectures built on the assumption that a human sits behind each request are now managing a minority of what they see. The investor case, in the investor's words. Blackstone's chief information security officer framed the thesis directly. "The way organizations secure internet-facing applications is fundamentally changing. AI-driven traffic and increasingly fragmented edge environments require a new approach to security management," said Adam Fletcher, Chief Information Security Officer at Blackstone. "Huskeys has built a platform designed to operate at enterprise scale while advancing a new category for the modern network edge. We believe the company is well positioned to redefine how organizations manage edge security, and we're excited to support Huskeys as they continue to develop their product in this important category." Fletcher's position gives that endorsement an unusual quality. Blackstone is both an investor in the round and a customer of the platform, which means the security leader vouching for the technology also operates it. Under the hood: the Unified Data Model. The technical foundation is a patented Unified Data Model. The UDM creates a common layer of understanding across different environments, technologies, and providers, which allows security insights, policies, and actions to move seamlessly across platforms. In practice, that means a policy intent expressed once can be translated into the specific dialect of whichever CDN, WAF, load balancer, VPC, or security group needs to enforce it. The platform connects and orchestrates the modern network edge ecosystem, including CDNs and WAFs, cloud-native security solutions, and network components such as load balancers, VPCs, and security groups. It supports multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments and helps organizations maintain consistent security from the Internet Edge all the way to the application. Sitting on top of that model are the capabilities customers actually operate: continuous posture assessment, dynamic policy generation, orchestration, and Virtual Patching. Virtual Patching allows security teams to mitigate vulnerabilities directly at the network edge within minutes, providing protection while a permanent fix is being developed, tested, and deployed in the application code. The platform also helps organizations identify, understand, and manage agentic traffic, enabling legitimate AI agents to interact with applications while reducing security risk, false positives, and disruption to the business. The founder's framing. Huskeys' chief executive described the origin of the company in terms of the tooling gap security teams inherited. "We founded Huskeys because security teams are being asked to protect increasingly complex edge environments with legacy tools that were never designed to work together or to address the challenges of the new AI era," said Itai Gafni, CEO and Co-Founder of Huskeys. "Every business today runs through its network edge - that's where your customers, your revenue, and your threats all meet, yet for most organizations, that edge works against them instead of for them. As AI transforms both legitimate traffic and cyberattacks, organizations need an intelligence layer that continuously understands what's happening across the edge and adapts security in real time. Our goal is to make the network finally work for the business, not against it. That's the category we're building." What the raise buys. Category creation is expensive and slow. It requires a product that works, customers willing to describe the problem in the vendor's language, and enough capital to stay in the market while analysts decide whether the acronym sticks. Huskeys now has $35 million in total funding, a customer roster that includes TikTok and Hugging Face, and a lead investor whose own security organization uses the product. The commercial question ahead is whether enterprises will fund a management layer as a distinct line item, separate from the CDN and WAF budgets it coordinates. The answer will depend on how visibly the platform reduces the operational load on teams that are already managing more edge surface than any single tool was designed to cover. On that measure, a trillion requests a day is a reasonable place to start proving it. Contact. TVC Analyst [email protected] Sponsored Financial Content

Israeli cybersecurity startup Huskeys has raised $27 million in a funding round led by US investment giant Blackstone, bringing total funding to $35 million. The company is developing an agentic AI layer for web application firewalls, technology it argues needs updating for an era of autonomous AI agents. Investors include Skinos Ventures, Shlomo Kramer's Yishay Yovel fund, and investment arms of Okta and Zscaler, alongside executives from Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and other tech firms. Okta and Zscaler have formed strategic partnerships with Huskeys. Founded by Unit 8200 alumni Itai Gafni and Roy Weissfeld, the company has secured customers including TikTok, Legoland, and Hugging Face since emerging from stealth five months ago.