Managed detection and response startup Daylight Security Inc. today revealed that it has raised $80 million in new funding after what it says was more than 40-fold revenue growth over the past year.

Daylight provides managed security operations in which artificial intelligence agents carry most of the routine load. Each customer gets a set of agents built by Daylight’s own security engineers and tailored to its systems and workflows. Decisions that need human judgment stay with those engineers.

Judging when to trust AI has itself become a bigger part of security work. In a survey of 856 cybersecurity professionals who use the technology, published by ISC2 Inc. in July, 65% said they spend more time on that call than they did a year earlier. Checking AI output takes longer for 63% of them.

Daylight lets customers hand over security operations entirely or run them jointly with an internal team. A third option puts forward-deployed Daylight engineers alongside the customer’s own staff. Customers also get access to Daylight’s Aura platform, which security teams can use to investigate their environment in natural language or to search a centralized data lake that the company began offering as a managed service in June.

According to Daylight, its service detects a threat within seconds and has it contained within minutes. Traditional managed security providers take up to 10 times as long, the company claims. Daylight’s coverage also reaches the AI systems that enterprises deploy internally, so an alert about prompt injection or a risky Model Context Protocol integration is investigated alongside identity, endpoint and cloud activity.

Visual collaboration company Miro is already using that capability. Other customers include AI app builder Lovable Labs Inc., password manager LastPass US LP, financial research startup Rogo Technologies Inc. and emerging-markets payments company dLocal Ltd.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Hagai Shapira said the measure of a security operation is shifting from headcount toward “how effectively AI agents can take on increasingly complex security work.” Under his model, human engineers still implement and govern the agents as they grow more capable.

Daylight’s founders met while serving in Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit. Both later worked at security automation company Torq Technologies Ltd., co-founder Eldad Rudich as its first employee and eventual vice president of research and development. Shapira was an early product leader there and worked closely with enterprise security teams.

Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the Series B round. Existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, Craft Ventures Management, Vintage Investment Partners and Maple Capital also participated. Craft Ventures led Daylight’s $33 million Series A round a year ago, three months after a $7 million seed round.

Irit Kahan, managing director and global head of cybersecurity investing within Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, said pairing human expertise with agentic technology could let Daylight’s customers respond “at machine speed.”

Daylight will use the funds to expand in the U.S. and enter markets across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. The company also plans to grow its security engineering and technology teams and keep developing Aura. Investors have now put $120 million into the company.

Image: Daylight Security