As AI security concerns rise, HiddenLayer raises $100M and Huskeys bags $27M
Artificial intelligence security startup HiddenLayer Inc. today announced a $100 million Series B round, and a separate $27 million Series A went to edge security company Huskeys Security Ltd.
Austin-based HiddenLayer, which dates to 2022, offers a product that checks models and the packages they depend on for tampering before deployment. Red-team exercises probe the same models for weaknesses. Live systems get watched at the inference layer, where HiddenLayer looks for prompt injection and for attempts to steal a model.
More than 50 new platform customers signed on over the past year. Annual recurring revenue grew more than tenfold in the same stretch and now sits in the tens of millions of dollars, Chief Executive and co-founder Chris Sestito told TechCrunch. A frontier model provider with more than 700 million weekly users is on the list. HiddenLayer did not say which one.
Sestito said the company set out to secure enterprise AI “long before most saw the urgency.” The new money goes toward expanding the Agentic Runtime Security line. A second product, Agent Harness Security, is aimed at the autonomous coding agents.
Delta-v Capital led the round. Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley and Microsoft Corp.’s M12 fund also took part, as did Booz Allen Ventures. M12 and Moore Strategic Ventures had led a $50 million Series A in September 2023. Counting a $6 million seed round, HiddenLayer has now raised about $156 million.
Itai Gafni and Roy Weisfeld started Huskeys in 2025. Both came out of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence arm. Their software reads the configurations of the web application firewalls, content delivery networks and load balancers a company already runs and holds all of it in one model. Posture assessment runs against that model, as do policy generation and virtual patching.
A lot of the traffic reaching those tools is no longer human. Huskeys says it processes upwards of a trillion web requests a day across its customer base. Gafni described the network edge as the place where “your customers, your revenue, and your threats all meet.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Blackstone Inc. backed the company to fight unwanted AI traffic. Blackstone uses the product as well.
TikTok Inc., Hugging Face Inc. and Legoland are among the other customers, along with telehealth provider Ro, formally Roman Health Ventures Inc. Blackstone Innovations Investments led the round. Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures, Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel also invested. Eran Reshef, described in the announcement as the inventor of the web application firewall, is among the angel investors. The Series A takes Huskeys to $35 million raised.
Adam Fletcher, chief information security officer at Blackstone, said AI-driven traffic and “increasingly fragmented edge environments” call for a new approach to security management. The company is “well-positioned to redefine how organizations manage edge security,” he added.
Photo: Huskeys
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