Month: November 2025

• Daylight just closed a $33 million Series A round led by David Sacks’ Craft Ventures.
• Founded by vets of Israel’s elite intel unit, Daylight is an AI-driven managed detection and response platform.
• Funding for Israeli security startups nearly doubled last year compared to 2023.

AI is fueling a surge in cyberattacks. Startups, especially in Israel, are rushing to use their own AI to stay one step ahead of the bad guys.

The latest is Tel Aviv-based Daylight, which closed a $33 million Series A round led by Craft Ventures, the San Francisco firm cofounded by PayPal and SpaceX backer David Sacks.

The funding comes as Google is attempting to close its $32 billion acquisition of Wiz, another Israeli-founded security firm, in what could be one of the largest cybersecurity deals ever.

Funding for Israeli security startups nearly doubled last year compared to 2023, reaching a level equal to 40% of the entire US cybersecurity funding market, according to data from Startup Nation Central.

Other investors in Daylight’s round include Bain Capital Ventures, Maple VC, and a who’s who of Israeli cybersecurity founders, including Wiz’s Assaf Rappaport, Torq’s Ofer Smadari, and Armis’s Yevgeny Dibrov. Daylight declined to share the valuation of the round.

When Daylight launched at the beginning of the year, cofounders Hagai Shapira and Eldad Rodich didn’t set out to raise another round of funding so soon. They’d just closed a seed round, hired their first engineers, and shipped their first product, an AI-driven managed detection and response platform.

Then Craft Ventures reached out with an offer too good to resist.

“You don’t want to take more money than you can handle,” Shapira told Business Insider on a Zoom call from Tel Aviv. “But we’re proving every day that we deserve that trust of our investors and, of course, the trust of our customers.”

Like Wiz’s founders, Shapira and Rodich are veterans of Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence unit that has produced some of the country’s most successful tech entrepreneurs.

Vega, another young Israeli cybersecurity company founded by 8200 veterans, announced $65 million in funding at a valuation of $400 million in September.

In the first quarter of this year, cyber attacks increased by nearly 50% per organization, according to Check Point Research. The prevalence of attacks makes it a good time to be in the cybersecurity business, said Kevin Gabura, a principal at Craft Ventures.

“AI has had a really disruptive impact on cybersecurity, and so that’s why you’re seeing a lot of new companies actually being built here,” said Gabura. “You’ve got all these AI agents that are going after different aspects of cybersecurity operations.”

Gabura said he was confident enough to offer Daylight a preemptive term sheet based on its early traction; The company already has dozens of clients across the US and Europe, including The Motley Fool, Cresta, and McKinsey Investment Office.

“They had shipped a ton of product in just the short time that they’ve been around,” said Gabura. We spent a lot of time talking to people who have used the product, and the feedback was really strong.”

• This post originally appeared in the Business Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider’s daily newsletter here.

Name something AI companies love more than buying compute power. I’ll wait.

OpenAI continued its power grab for … power with a $38 billion deal with Amazon’s AWS.

These deals are starting to meld together for me. So, I decided to bug my fantastic colleague Alistair Barr, who covers this topic closely. (He also writes the amazing Tech Memo newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.)

OK, let’s get into it:

Dan: I once joked that OpenAI only cuts deals for more compute on days that end in “y,” but it’s really feeling that way now. What’s your top-line takeaway from its deal with AWS?

Alistair: Amazon couldn’t work with OpenAI models until recently. Microsoft redid its big agreement with OpenAI last week, and as part of that the startup has more freedom to sign deals with other cloud providers. One of the first things you’d do in that situation is call AWS for capacity. It’s still the big dog in cloud!

Dan: But just because you can doesn’t mean you should, right? OpenAI has more than $1 trillion worth of compute deals on the books. Executives like to say the biggest risk is not spending enough, but at what point does that argument reach its limit? Or perhaps I’m too small-minded (hence why VCs aren’t throwing billions at me).

Alistair: What OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said earlier this year was illuminating. The company has to choose which projects not to pursue because it lacks computing resources. For any ambitious leader, being held back simply by a shortage of computers must be maddening. From that angle, signing as many AI-cloud deals as possible seems rational.

Dan: Fair point! But are these products driving real revenue? You recently wrote about a slowdown in enterprise AI adoption. I wonder if it shows a disconnect between AI executives’ hefty proclamations and the reality of user interest in their tools.

Alistair: True. OpenAI is still a startup, and its future earnings potential is hard to gauge. That’s common in tech. Many companies start with products that make little revenue and look wildly unprofitable while they invest heavily to attract users. Monetization comes later, and sometimes profits explode. Amazon is the classic example; Meta too — it now earns around $70 billion a year in profit.

Dan: OK, so how does OpenAI get there in the next decade or so? All this spending still has me a bit uneasy. (Although Sam Altman might not like me saying that.)

Alistair: Search-style ads in ChatGPT could be a goldmine. A billion people revealing private desires and wishes — this is the richest ad data since Google. Google makes about $100 billion in annual profit from Search. If OpenAI captures half that, ChatGPT ads alone could yield $50 billion in profit. With the AI video network Sora, you could apply the same model. Using Meta as the comparison, with roughly $70 billion in annual profit, OpenAI could earn another $35 billion.

Add consumer and enterprise subscriptions, and potentially an Apple-style device business, workplace AI tools, and an AI-powered App Store. If many of these future businesses succeed, OpenAI could approach $100 billion in annual profit, enough to fund many data center deals. Of course, none of this is certain. As Marc Andreessen likes to ask, “Is OpenAI the next Google?” That’s the trillion-dollar question. If I knew the answer, I’d be investing, not writing, for a living.

The Business Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy executive editor and anchor, in New York. Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York.