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Mock cyber attacks used to cost about $30,000<\/a>, take two weeks, and tell companies what their defenses looked like six months ago. Then Anthropic\u2019s Mythos showed up, exposing thousands of zero-day vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n A (yes, as in the letter) uses AI to continuously break into its own customers\u2019 systems\u2014finding real attack paths and fixing them\u2014before actual hackers get the chance. The New York-based autonomous offensive security startup, emerged from stealth with $37 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Cyberstarts, and angels including Wiz CEO Assaf Rapaport and\u00a0Cyera CEO Yotam Segev, Fortune<\/em> learned exclusively.<\/p>\n The timing is hard to miss. Anthropic\u2019s Mythos model<\/a>\u2014unveiled April 8 in a restricted release\u2014autonomously surfaced previously unknown security flaws across every major operating system and browser. This handed unsophisticated attackers a preview of what\u2019s coming. \u201cToday every teenager, every grandmother can take a laptop, access those frontier models, and do things that were once reserved for nation-state actors,\u201d A CEO and cofounder Yossi Torati told me. \u201cWe will face a meltdown in the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n Torati spent six years at Israeli incident response firm Sygnia helping organizations investigate and recover from major hacks and responding to breaches across roughly 40 countries. His cofounders, Omer Gull and Yuval Itzchakov, come from similar cyber backgrounds from Check Point, Hunters, and IDF Unit 8200.\u00a0<\/p>\n A\u2019s founding moment was when Torati saw attackers begin to use AI and realized that most of what the industry had built\u00a0was about to become obsolete. \u201cThis is a fundamental revolution of how attackers operate and how defenders need to respond,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Instead of flagging risk hotspots or handing companies a severity score\u2014A runs the full cyber offensive lifecycle autonomously, acting like an AI-powered attacker to find weaknesses, then helping fix them before a real attacker can. In one early proof-of-concept, A turned up 1.2 million sensitive customer records, including Social Security numbers, that had been sitting exposed for seven years, undetected by the customer\u2019s own team and existing tooling. Torati didn\u2019t disclose the customer\u2019s name.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the white space Lightspeed partner Guru Chahal says his firm was hunting for. \u201cThe gap between the time where an issue is discovered to the time you get hit with it is minutes,\u201d Chahal told me. \u201cCISOs are terrified of this right now.\u201d He says the old model\u2014paying for a manual simulated cyberattack once every six to 12 months\u2014is effectively dead. \u201cIn those six months, someone\u2019s going to walk away with all your crown jewels. And so what\u2019s the point, even?\u201d<\/p>\n The market A is chasing\u2014continuous threat exposure management\u2014was estimated at $2.7 billion<\/a> in 2025 and is projected to reach $7 billion by 2033. The competitive field includes well-funded AI-native players like XBOW, which raised $120 million<\/a> at a $1 billion-plus valuation in March.<\/p>\n Chahal, for his part, isn\u2019t hedging. \u201cI genuinely believe some of the largest companies are going to get built in this category,\u201d he told me.\u00a0<\/p>\n The capital will go toward scaling go-to-market and building out the product roadmap. Current A customers are all enterprises\u2014finance, healthcare, critical infrastructure, and technology\u2014though Torati declined to give a number.\u00a0<\/p>\n As for the name, Torati says it represents going back to first principles\u2014the attacker\u2019s perspective, the root of what cybersecurity was always supposed to be. Being first in the alphabet, he acknowledged with a laugh, doesn\u2019t hurt either.<\/p>\n See you tomorrow,<\/p>\n Lily Mae Lazarus Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today\u2019s newsletter.<\/em> Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n – <\/span>Allen<\/b> Control<\/b> Systems<\/b><\/a>, an Austin, Texas-based autonomous precision robotics company, raised $200 million in Series B funding. <\/span>Smash<\/b> Capital<\/b> led the round and was joined by existing investors <\/span>Craft Ventures<\/b>,<\/span> Rally<\/b> Ventures<\/b>, <\/span>Inspired<\/b> Capital<\/b>, and others.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>Paypercut<\/b><\/a>, a Sofia, Bulgaria-based fintech payments platform, raised \u20ac5 million ($5.8 million) in seed funding. <\/span>Concentric<\/b>, <\/span>Passion<\/b> Capital<\/b>, and <\/span>Araya<\/b> Ventures<\/b> led the round.<\/span><\/p>\n – <\/span>ITG<\/b><\/a>, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based contractor that builds, installs, and maintains broadband and fiber networks for telecom and utility providers, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. The company posted $1.3 billion in sales for the year ended March 31. <\/span>Oaktree<\/b> Capital<\/b> Management<\/b> backs the company.<\/span><\/p>\n\n
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