AI-driven managed security startup Daylight raises $80M on 40-fold revenue growth

Daylight Security Inc., a startup that provides managed detection and response services, said it has raised $80 million in a Series B round following what the company describes as more than 40-fold revenue growth over the past year.

Daylight's service relies on artificial intelligence agents to handle most routine security operations work. The agents are built by Daylight's own security engineers and customized to each customer's systems and workflows, while decisions requiring human judgment remain with those engineers. The company said its service detects a threat within seconds and contains it within minutes, and it claims traditional managed security providers take up to 10 times as long.

Customers can turn security operations over to Daylight entirely, share the work with an internal team, or have Daylight engineers work alongside customer staff. They also get access to Daylight's Aura platform, which lets security teams investigate their environment in natural language or search a centralized data lake that Daylight began offering as a managed service in June. The company's coverage extends to AI systems that enterprises deploy internally, so alerts about prompt injection or a risky Model Context Protocol integration are investigated alongside identity, endpoint and cloud activity.

Customers include visual collaboration company Miro, 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, with human engineers still implementing and governing the agents as they grow more capable. Daylight's founders met while serving in Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence unit, and both later worked at security automation company Torq Technologies Ltd. Shapira was an early product leader there, while co-founder Eldad Rudich was its first employee and eventual vice president of research and development.

The company pointed to the challenge of judging when to trust AI. 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, and 63% said checking AI output takes longer.

Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the round, with existing backers Bain Capital Ventures, Craft Ventures Management, Vintage Investment Partners and Maple Capital participating. 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 plans to use the funds to expand in the U.S. and enter markets across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific, and to grow its security engineering and technology teams while continuing to develop Aura. Investors have now put $120 million into the company.

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