Israeli startup Onit Security has raised $11 million to use AI agents to identify and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
The Tel Aviv-based startup was founded in early 2025 to address a problem that one of its co-founders, Ofer Amitai, experienced firsthand at his previous company: cyberattacks stemming from overlooked vulnerabilities.
In late 2020, a group of Iranian-linked hackers broke into Israeli security firm PortKnox and stole customer data.
“They weren’t using any super-sophisticated attacks,” Amitai, PortKnox’s CEO at the time, told Business Insider. He said the damage had been “mostly contained,” but added that incidents like this “leave scars.”
“When someone breaks into your home, you don’t expect them to continue acting the same way,” he said. “I don’t want any CISO to experience that feeling in the future.”
Amitai worked with fellow entrepreneurs and friends Elad Ben Meir and Tom Winter to build a tool to help other companies discover the types of vulnerabilities that led to the Portnox breach.
Onit CEO Ben Meir told Business Insider that AI agents that run autonomously in the background, such as Anthropic’s Claude Code for building and managing software, have changed the game for enterprises.
“And it’s the same with cybersecurity,” he said. “Why shouldn’t agents be allowed to do tasks that humans can’t do?”
AI agents are becoming increasingly competitive in the cybersecurity market, with startups like Safe Security, Reco, and Bold deploying them in a variety of ways to protect organizations.
Onit’s “fleet” of AI agents autonomously perform a variety of tasks, including gathering threat intelligence, understanding business context, such as internal asset ownership, and providing solutions, Ben Meir said. However, a human always needs to give final approval for the AI to implement a fix.
“There’s always a human in the middle,” he says. “I don’t think the market is ready yet for fully autonomous agent operation.”
Onit offers agents as a Software-as-a-Service model, with tiered subscriptions if companies want to add more agents. The startup, which came out of stealth this week, said it is already working with about 15 Fortune 1000 customers. Ben Meir said the focus is on large companies with “complex environments” such as financial institutions and manufacturing.
Onit’s seed funding round was led by Hetz Ventures and Brightmind Partners, with additional investment from anonymous angel investors.
Onit said it plans to use the new funding to expand its product development and go-to-market efforts to target new industries.
Here’s an exclusive look at the pitch deck used by Onit Security to raise an $11 million seed round.