Daylight raises USD $80 million to scale AI security

Daylight has raised USD $80 million in a Series B funding round led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives, bringing the cyber security company's total funding to USD $120 million.

Existing investors Bain Capital, Craft Ventures, Vintage Partners and Maple Capital also participated, while Okta Ventures joined as a new investor. The latest financing follows a period of rapid growth in demand from large enterprises and AI-focused companies.

The New York-based company sells a security operations service that combines AI agents with human security engineers. Customers use the service to detect, investigate and respond to cyber threats through delivery models ranging from fully managed support to co-managed arrangements and embedded engineering help.

Daylight said its revenue increased more than 40-fold over the past year. Its customer list includes Lovable, LastPass, Rogo, dLocal and Miro.

The fundraising comes as companies face growing pressure on cyber incident response teams. Daylight pointed to a recent rise in attacks and to wider industry concerns about the practical use of AI in security operations, where staff can spend significant time checking whether automated recommendations and outputs are reliable.

Many organisations are also trying to balance outsourced services with in-house control. Traditional managed security providers often offer standardised services, while standalone AI tools can add another layer of systems for companies to manage.

Daylight's model uses AI agents for routine security operations, while human engineers handle decisions that require judgement. The company said its system can detect threats in seconds and respond to and contain them within minutes, making it up to 10 times faster than traditional managed security providers.

Its platform, called Aura, also lets customers investigate their security environment using natural language, access security data through a central data lake and manage operations in one place. The service also covers threats linked to enterprises' own use of AI systems, including prompt injection, risky MCPs and unusual AI-driven activity.

One focus for the business is linking AI-related alerts with other forms of security telemetry and business context. That allows activity tied to AI tools to be reviewed alongside identity, endpoint, cloud and software-as-a-service data as part of the same detection and response workflow.

Daylight was founded by Hagai Shapira and Eldad Rudich, who first met while serving in an Israeli military intelligence unit. Before starting the company, both worked at cybersecurity group Torq, where Shapira held product leadership roles, and Rudich served as the first employee and vice president of research and development.

The fresh capital will be used to expand Daylight's US presence, enter markets across EMEA and APAC, grow its security engineering and technology teams, and continue developing its platform.

Hagai Shapira outlined the company's view of how security operations are changing.

"The future of security operations won't be defined by how many people a company can deploy, but by how effectively AI agents can take on increasingly complex security work," said Hagai Shapira, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Daylight. "As these agents become more capable, they'll fundamentally change how threats are detected, investigated, and contained, with expert security engineers implementing, governing, and continuously improving their operations. At Daylight, we're already bringing this vision to life through an agent-native model that combines the speed and scale of AI with the judgment and oversight of human experts. We're building the foundation for a new era of security operations."

For Goldman Sachs Alternatives, the investment reflects a view that cybersecurity spending will remain resilient as companies look for ways to manage rising alert volumes and more complex digital environments. The investor also pointed to the role of agent-based software in changing how security services are delivered.

"Cybersecurity remains a top priority for enterprises of all sizes, and we see a significant opportunity for agentic technologies to transform how security outcomes are delivered," said Irit Kahan, Managing Director and Global Head of Cyber Security Investing within Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. "By scaling human expertise with agentic technology, Daylight has the potential to enable organizations to respond at machine speed, with greater accuracy and at scale."

George Foster, investor within Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, added: "Daylight continues to drive innovation in this space, scaling high-level security expertise through the use of agentic technology. We believe this combination positions the company to have the potential to become a leader in the next generation of cybersecurity."