Exaforce raises $125 million Series B to build artificial intelligence to catch and stop cyberattacks as they happen

With bad actors weaponizing AI to exploit software vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed, companies are increasingly recognizing the need to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses.

Fortunately, these AI tools are also helping companies fight back.

The need for such capabilities helped Exaforce, an AI startup that detects attacks in real time, secure a $125 million Series B. The round valued the three-year-old startup at $725 million, and saw participation from HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, and Seligman Ventures.

The massive funding round comes just one year after Exaforce raised a $75 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $200 million. The influx of capital highlights the high cost of building and selling an AI-powered security operations center (SOC), and the enormous market opportunity investors see in this space.

Exaforce says it uses artificial intelligence agents, called “Exabots,” with deep data analysis to automate security operations, taking the heavy burden off human analysts.

For the startup’s co-founder and CEO Ankur Singla, the mission is clear and straightforward: apply artificial intelligence to catch and stop threats as they occur. “It is a very simple task, but its implementation is very complex,” he said.

The real challenge facing security teams is that the vast majority of threat alerts are false positives. “The security operations person receives hundreds of alerts. How do you know what a real high-priority alert is?” said Umesh Padhaval, managing partner at Seligman Ventures, comparing the work of security teams to searching for a needle in a haystack.

Exaforce claims that its AI platform can reduce time-consuming manual tasks by up to 90%.

Recognizing the rise in cyberattacks, the startup recently introduced Sentiment Hunting, a feature that allows security teams to query its AI platform using natural language to investigate potential attacks based on simple hunch. “By tracking the atmosphere, you can put forward a very simple hypothesis like: Have we received any new attacks from Iran?” Singla said.

Exaforce officially launched its product on the market in the fourth quarter of last year, after two years of testing with design partners. The startup has since added 20 clients, including notable names like Replit and Guardant Health. Given the rise in cyberattacks, Singla told TechCrunch that Exaforce expects to reach 40 to 50 customers by the end of the year.

The high-profile attacks “enhanced our ability to reach customers, because customers now don’t ask: Why do I need this?”, Singla said. The question he hears most often now is: “How do I activate it?”

Exaforce isn’t the only company applying AI to security operations. The company faces competition from startups such as 7ai, Dropzone AI, and Prophet Security, as well as industry giants Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.