Novee Emerges From Stealth With $51.5M to Counter AI Cyberattacks With a Proprietary AI Hacker

TEL AVIV, Israel--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan 14, 2026--

Novee, an emerging leader in AI offensive security, today announced its out-of-stealth launch with $51.5 million in total funding, led by YL Ventures, Canaan Partners and Oren Zeev (Zeev Ventures).

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The company raised its Series A round within four months of founding – one of the fastest funding trajectories in the offensive security sector, driven by rapid customer traction, an elite team spanning AI research and offensive cybersecurity backgrounds and growing urgency as AI-powered cyberattacks accelerate.

Attackers are already leveraging AI to operate at machine speed, automating reconnaissance, continuously probing systems and weaponizing weaknesses faster than defenders can respond. To keep up, defense must move at the same pace. Yet security testing remains tethered to human-scale workflows. While software is now built and deployed continuously, penetration testing still happens episodically or relies on shallow automation. Organizations are no longer defending against static threats. They’re up against automated, adaptive adversaries who can exploit a vulnerability in the time it takes a human tester to open a ticket, leaving dangerous blind spots deep inside production environments.

Novee closes this gap by transforming elite offensive tradecraft into continuous, AI-driven penetration testing, simulating the sophisticated tactics of real-world hackers. It’s the only penetration testing platform capable of uncovering novel vulnerabilities, including complex business logic flaws that previously only the most advanced manual pentesters could find. From initial exploit validation to automated retesting, Novee provides an end-to-end loop that confirms critical risks are not just identified, but permanently removed.

“Traditional DAST tools struggled to surface issues that actually matter to us. We needed testing that could identify more complex vulnerabilities, like server-side request forgery, which scanners just aren’t capable of detecting. Novee filled that gap by consistently uncovering higher-quality findings that we simply weren’t seeing before,” said Robert Kugler, Head of Security, IT and Compliance at Cresta.

While other AI penetration testing platforms rely on generic AI models optimized for text and general reasoning, Novee has built a proprietary, purpose-trained, patent-pending AI model designed specifically for offensive security. Trained on real-world exploitation techniques, tools and workflows, Novee’s proprietary AI model outperformed frontier LLMs such as Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 4 Sonnet by over 55% on constrained web exploitation challenges, achieving up to 90% accuracy where general-purpose models typically plateau at around 65%.

“Novee’s benchmarks show a clear performance advantage for their proprietary AI pentesting model over frontier LLMs,” said Tal Shapira, Ph.D., CTO at Reco AI. “Because success is measured through live exploit execution rather than proxy metrics, the results are particularly strong and methodologically sound. From an AI research perspective, this reinforces a broader truth: penetration testing is an adversarial, environment-driven problem, and purpose-trained models will consistently outperform general-purpose language models in this domain.”

“Attackers don’t wait for your annual pentest. Neither should your defense,” said Ido Geffen, co-founder and CEO of Novee. “What security teams actually need are high-signal findings they can trust: novel vulnerabilities that are proven exploitable. Novee has already helped organizations uncover hundreds of these novel vulnerabilities and fix them continuously, closing gaps before attackers exploit them.”

Novee was founded in May 2025 by Ido Geffen (CEO), Gon Chalamish (CPO) and Omer Ninburg (CTO), veteran offensive security leaders from the Israel Defense Force’s most elite cyber programs, who led nation-state–level offensive security operations.

“Novee is built by a team that has spent decades operating at the highest levels of offensive cyber and critical infrastructure defense,” said Yoav Leitersdorf, Managing Partner at YL Ventures. “They understand how real attackers think because they have done this work themselves, at scale and under real-world constraints. What they are building reflects a deep understanding of how AI is reshaping the balance between attack and defense. As AI changes the speed and nature of attacks, offensive security becomes a continuous capability, not a periodic exercise. Novee is executing on that shift with rare technical rigor and conviction.”

“What convinced us wasn’t just the vision; it was the urgency of the moment and the speed of real-world adoption,” said Joydeep Bhattacharyya, General Partner at Canaan Ventures. “As cybersecurity enters an AI-driven arms race, enterprises need continuous penetration testing—and Novee is delivering exactly that. In just a few months, the team has strategic customers across financial services, healthcare, technology and manufacturing. We’re excited to back a team with deep expertise, strong product-market fit and the potential to define this category.”

To learn more about Novee’s revolutionary platform and book a demo, visit novee.security.

About Novee
Novee ( novee.security ) is the AI penetration testing platform built to secure constantly changing environments against attackers operating at machine speed. Its purpose-trained AI reasons like a real attacker, uncovers novel attack paths continuously, and delivers precise, personalized fixes so teams can stay one step ahead of hackers. Founded by national-level offensive security leaders Ido Geffen, Gon Chalamish, and Omer Ninburg, Novee has raised $51.5 million within four months of its inception from leading investors including YL Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Zeev Ventures. Learn more at novee.security.

About YL Ventures
YL Ventures is a venture capital firm dedicated exclusively to cybersecurity. For nearly two decades, the firm has partnered with top Israeli founders from inception, helping build category-leading companies that define the market. With offices in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv and $800M under management, YL Ventures provides access to an unrivaled network of CISOs and industry leaders, shaping the next generation of Israeli cybersecurity innovation. Repeatedly recognized by PitchBook and TIME magazine for both performance and influence, YL Ventures stands at the forefront of cybersecurity venture capital.

Novee Emerges From Stealth With $51.5M to Counter AI Cyberattacks With a Proprietary AI Hacker

NEW YORK (AP) — Ten years ago, Kim Gordon — a revolutionary force in the alternative rock band Sonic Youth, the ’80s New York no wave scene and the space between art and noise — debuted solo music. At the time, she was already decades into a celebrated, mixed-medium creative career.

The midtempo “Murdered Out” was her first single, where clangorous, overdubbed guitars met the unmistakable rasp of her deadpan intonations. It was a surprise from an experimentalist well-versed in the unexpected: The song took inspiration from Los Angeles car culture, and its main collaborator was the producer Justin Raisen, then best known for his pop work with Sky Ferreira and Charli XCX. Their partnership has continued in the decade since, and on March 13, Gordon will drop her third solo album, “Play Me,” announced Wednesday alongside the release of a hazy, transcendent single, “Not Today.”

“It was a happy accident,” she says of her continued work with Raisen. “In the beginning, I was somewhat skeptical of working with a producer and collaborator, really. But it’s turned out to be incredibly freeing.”

“Play Me” follows Gordon's critically lauded, beat-heavy 2024 album “The Collective,” a noisy body of work that featured oddball trap blasts. It earned her two Grammy nominations — a career first — for alternative music album and alternative music performance. Those were for the song “Bye Bye,” with its eerie, dissonant beat originally written for rapper Playboi Carti. For “Play Me,” Gordon reimagined the track for the closer, “Bye Bye 25!” She says it was the result of her thinking about the rap world, where revisiting and remixing is commonplace.

“I came up with the idea of using these words that Trump had sort of ‘banned’ in his mind,” she says of the new song's lyrics. (An example: “Injustice / Opportunity / Dietary guidelines / Housing for the future.” President Donald Trump’s administration associates the terms with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which it has vowed to root out across the government.) For Gordon, because it became “more conceptual … the remake doesn’t seem as anxiety-provoking as the original.”

There is a connective spirit between “The Collective” and “Play Me” — a shared confrontation, propulsive production and songs that possess a keen ability to process and reflect the world around Gordon. “It does feel kind of like an evolution,” she says of this album next to her last. “It’s sort of a more focused record, and immediate.” The songs are shorter and attentive.

Or, to put it more simply: “I like beats and that inspires me more than melodies,” she says. “Beats and space.”

That palette drives “Play Me,” a foundation in which staccato lyricism transforms and offers astute criticism. Consider the title track, which challenges passive listening and the devaluation of music in the age of streaming. She names Spotify playlist titles, imagined genres defined by mood rather than music. “Rich popular girl / Villain mode” she speak-sings, “Jazz and background / Chillin' after work.”

“It's just representative of, you know, this era we're in, this culture of convenience,” she says. “Music always represented a certain amount of freedom to me, and it feels like that’s kind of been blanketed over.”

Sonically, it is a message delivered atop a '70s groove, placing it in conversation with an era unshackled from these digital technologies.

The title, too, “is playing off the sort of passive nature of listening to music,” she says, “But also it could be seen as defiant. Like, I dare you to play me.”

There's also the blown-out “Subcon,” which examines the world's growing billionaire class and their fascination with space colonialization in a period of economic insecurity. In the song, Gordon's lyrical abstractions highlight the absurdity, taking aim at technocrats.

“I find reality inspirational, no matter how bad it is,” she says. Where some artists might veer away from the news, Gordon tackles truth. “I’m not sure what music is supposed to be. So, I’m just doing my version of it.”

In the end, she hopes listeners are “somewhat thrilled by” the album.

“'This is the music that I’ve wanted to hear,’ kind of feeling. Does that sound egotistical? I don’t know,” she laughs. If it is, it is earned.

1. “Play Me”

2. “Girl with a Look”

3. “No Hands”

4. “Black Out”

5. “Dirty Tech”

6. “Not Today”

7. “Busy Bee”

8. “Square Jaw”

9. “Subcon”

10. “Post Empire”

11. “Nail Bitter”

12. “Bye Bye 25!”

Kim Gordon poses for a portrait in New York on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (Photo by Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP)

Kim Gordon poses for a portrait in New York on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025. (Photo by Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP)

Kim Gordon poses for a portrait on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025, in New York (Photo by Taylor Jewell/Invision/AP)