Enclave, a startup focused on finding the most dangerous security flaws buried deep in code written by AI, is launching from stealth with $6 million in seed funding at a $33 million valuation, led by 8VC.
The round includes prominent technology investors and executives, including Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.
8VC’s bet on Enclave is shaped in part by its investment in AI coding startup Cognition. Cognition, the company behind the coding agency Devin, has been able to sit at the forefront of the rate at which AI-generating software is gaining traction.
“As a result, we’ve seen a lot of AI code generation both at our company and in large enterprises,” 8VC’s Vivek Gopalan said in an interview. “Previous generation tools can’t solve this problem.”
Enclave was founded by CEO Tal Hoffman, CTO Dvir Segev, and CPO Yanir Tsarimi, who previously worked together in application security. Hoffman and Tsalimi met while serving in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, a military intelligence unit widely known as a training ground for cybersecurity and AI talent. The sector has produced a number of notable technology companies, including cybersecurity companies such as Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk, and Wiz.
AI has proven to be very skilled at coding
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year that up to 30% of the company’s code is written by AI. Boris Cherny, founder and director of Claude Code, said this year that “almost 100% of our code is written with Claude Code + Opus 4.5” and he hasn’t written a single line of code in two months.
Hoffman, who started coding at age 12, estimates that up to 60% of all startup code is written by AI.
“Within three years, we will definitely hit 90%,” he said, adding that AI has made coding in Enclave much faster.
“Yesterday we were writing this big feature that normally takes two weeks,” he said. “The AI did it in two hours.”
But Hoffman says any code generated by AI creates vulnerabilities.
“Current solutions optimize for quantity, not quality,” he said.
Enclave joins a crowded application security market that includes companies like Snyk, Checkmarx, and Semgrep. Hoffman aims to stand out by focusing on understanding systems holistically rather than scanning for known issues.
“By incorporating that deep knowledge into the behavior of the system, it becomes much easier to look for where the vulnerabilities are,” he says.