Cybersecurity startup Bold Security announced it has emerged from stealth with a $40 million funding round backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Picture Capital and Red Dot Capital Partners.
The company says it focuses on what employees and artificial intelligence tools are doing on enterprise edge devices and works to reduce security risks in real time.
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Bold founders: CPO Hadar Krasner, CTO Omri Mallis and CEO Nati Hazut
(Photo: Omer Hacohen)
Bold was founded by CEO Nati Hazut, Chief Product Officer Hadar Krasner and Chief Technology Officer Omri Mallis, a team the company described as serial entrepreneurs and cybersecurity veterans with experience building and scaling security platforms.
Hazut, 35, is on his third company. He previously founded data security startup Polyrize, which was acquired by Varonis and whose technology now serves as a core part of Varonis’ cloud platform, according to the company. He also founded SAM, whose technology the company said protects more than 500 million connected devices worldwide for major telecommunications providers, including Verizon and Virgin Media.
Bold said it has grown quickly and is already working with Fortune 500 companies and other U.S. enterprise customers, including Shutterfly and Tekion.
“For years, the endpoint was the industry’s biggest blind spot. A decade ago, we assumed everything would consolidate in the cloud, and the problem would solve itself,” Hazut said in a statement. “The AI boom didn’t just challenge that assumption, it completely reversed it. AI has opened up significant new security gaps, but it has also created the path to solving them.”
The company said it uses edge AI to turn endpoints from passive subjects of security monitoring into active agents. Its system runs AI directly on computers and other endpoint devices, where employees actually work, with the aim of understanding user behavior and providing protection in real time.
Bold said that approach avoids the cost, latency and privacy concerns that have limited cloud-based AI at enterprise scale. The company said its custom models can interpret data in business context, understand how users work and detect risk as it happens rather than after the fact.
According to the company, early enterprise customers have reduced alert volumes by as much as 90%, allowing security teams to focus on the most significant incidents at a scale they can manage operationally.
Amit Karp, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said the firm backed Bold because of both its vision and its founding team.
“This is a group of founders who have successfully brought products to market across agent-based systems, insider risk and data security,” Karp said in a statement. “That combination of deep technical experience and real-world operating insight puts them in a rare position to solve the next generation of endpoint risk.”
Jeff Simon, chief information security officer at Shutterfly, said one of the biggest challenges in endpoint security is protecting users without slowing them down.
“As AI becomes part of daily workflows, Bold helps us apply security in a way that’s effective but unobtrusive, so teams can keep moving fast without creating new risks,” Simon said.
Bold said it plans to use the new funding to accelerate its go-to-market efforts, invest in the long-term development of its platform and expand globally while continuing to build edge AI capabilities for real-time security in modern enterprise environments.