US giant Blackstone invests in Israeli cyber startup tackling malicious AI web traffic

US investment giant Blackstone is backing a $27 million investment into one-year-old Israeli cybersecurity startup Huskeys, which is building a platform to protect businesses and organizations from malicious automated web traffic.

The funding round led by Blackstone values the young startup at about $100 million. The round was joined by Skinos Ventures, the investment fund of Shlomo Kramer, a prominent Israeli cybersecurity entrepreneur, who previously co-founded Check Point Software Technologies. Investment funds of cybersecurity companies Zscaler and Okta Ventures, alongside Merlin Ventures, also participated.

Other investors include Israeli actor and comedian Assi Cohen and mentalist Lior Suchard, who also serves as an adviser to the startup. To date, the startup has raised a total of $35 million.

Blackstone, which has over $1.3 trillion in assets under management, opened an office in Tel Aviv in 2021 to tap into the Jewish state’s growing or more established tech firms, including cybersecurity company Cyera, Adaptive Shield and Priority Software.

Huskeys was founded in 2025 by IDF intelligence Unit 8200 alumni Itai Gafni (CEO), who led AI projects during his military service, and Roy Weisfeld (CTO), who was a security researcher focused on web hacking in complex hybrid environments.

The two founders have been developing a platform to complement 30-year-old web security infrastructure, which was built to filter traffic as internet usage by human actors increased. The startup said its platform is designed to adapt traditional web application firewall protection to the new challenges arising from AI agents and autonomous systems operating independently across the web.

“Artificial intelligence has changed the way the internet operates, bringing enormous opportunities alongside new security risks and the potential for lost revenue,” said Gafni. “We believe that in the near future, most identities operating on the web will be autonomous agents, and organizations will need a new infrastructure capable of identifying, securing and managing them.”

The shift is posing challenges for businesses and organizations that rely on web traffic as a core revenue driver, such as online shopping websites, to distinguish legitimate automated users, such as AI agents, from malicious activity.

The cybersecurity startup’s platform is a plug-and-play security layer, which can be integrated into existing web security tools to help security teams reduce false positives and ensure only malicious traffic is blocked.

Tel Aviv-based Huskeys has 40 employees and counts online social media giant TikTok, Merlin Entertainments and Hugging Face among its customers.