Israeli cybersecurity startup Malanta emerged from stealth Wednesday with $10 million in seed funding and a mission to disrupt cyberattacks before they begin, offering what it calls the industry's first pre-attack prevention platform.
Founded in 2024 by veterans of cybersecurity firm CyberArk, Malanta targets a rising threat it dubs “AI.Attackers” — adversaries who use artificial intelligence to automate reconnaissance and exploit digital vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed. Rather than respond after breaches occur, Malanta’s platform seeks to detect and dismantle threat infrastructure before attacks take shape.
The company’s technology collects early-stage signals across the internet — such as suspicious domain registrations, command-and-control setups or phishing toolkits under development — and uses predictive intelligence to surface what it calls Indicators of Pre-Attack (IoPA). These allow security teams to anticipate how and when adversaries will act, ranking threats by their likelihood of being weaponized.
“Malanta was born to solve a major gap in the age of AI: the window between exposure and compromise is shrinking dramatically,” said Kobi Ben Naim, Malanta’s co-founder and CEO. “We spoke with more than 70 CISOs and founders who told us they’re overloaded with 3–7 threat-intel feeds yet struggle to operationalize them, and success is still measured by cleanup (MTTD/MTTR), not prevention. We’re here to change that.”
The seed round was led by Cardumen Capital, with participation from The Group Ventures. Notable early backers include Udi Mokady, founder and executive chairman of CyberArk, along with angel investors Benny Schneider, Harel Prag and Amit Greener of Rollout Ventures.
Malanta’s founding team — Ben Naim, Guy Ben Arie (Engineering), Yossi Dantes (Product) and Tal Kandel (Business) — brings over two decades of experience in cyber defense, deep-tech and AI development. They previously worked together at CyberArk, scaling products from inception to more than $100 million in annual revenue.
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Left to right: Malanta Head of Engineering Guy Ben Arie, CPO Yossi Dantes, CBO Tal Kandel and CEO Kobi Ben Naim
(Photo: David Garb)
The company says its system can map a customer’s digital footprint within minutes of onboarding, using neural exposure mapping to highlight critical assets and emerging threats. It already has deployments with customers across financial services, technology, government and software sectors.
Malanta's technology is also being used by the National Cyber Directorate, which has reportedly dismantled adversary infrastructure targeting hundreds of Israeli companies with the help of the platform’s pre-attack intelligence.
The $10 million in new funding will be used to expand engineering and go-to-market teams, enhance integration with existing cybersecurity systems and develop additional data sources for IoPA detection. Malanta also plans to extend its platform’s reach to expose attacker infrastructure even earlier in the threat lifecycle.
“The only way to level the playing field is to prepare, like the attackers, before the attack takes place. In other words, focus on pre-attack prevention,” said Gonzalo Martínez De Azagra, founder and general partner at Cardumen Capital. “AI is transforming the security landscape, and the global AI and cybersecurity market is projected to reach $86 billion by 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence. The team has created a durable advantage for enterprises of all sizes.”
According to Mordor Intelligence, the global AI and cybersecurity market is projected to reach $86 billion by 2026.