Israeli startup nabs funds to build defense layer against evolving AI cyber threats
Pillar Security raises $9 million in seed funding to triple its workforce and expand its R&D operations to help businesses build secure AI systems
Sharon Wrobel is a tech reporter for The Times of Israel
Israeli startup Pillar Security on Wednesday launched a platform to secure AI-integrated software systems, addressing growing gaps in monitoring and protection as traditional cybersecurity tools fall behind.
The Tel Aviv-based startup said it raised $9 million in seed funding to expand its research & development operations and triple its workforce from 10 to 30 employees by the end of the year.
The financing round was led by Shield Capital, a venture capital fund that has Dan Caine, the recently tapped chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and a top military adviser to US President Donald Trump, as a partner. Other investors that joined the round include Golden Ventures, Ground Up Ventures and a group of strategic angel investors.
“AI is fundamentally changing the way we build software — it doesn’t just add another step to traditional processes; it introduces an entirely new lifecycle,” said Pillar co-founder Dor Sarig. “As AI evolves beyond traditional software, with data becoming executable and systems acting autonomously, our security paradigms must fundamentally shift.”
“Pillar’s technology, backed by real-world AI threat intelligence, is built with this understanding, delivering a new class of protection designed explicitly for AI-related security risks,” Sarig added.
Founded in October 2023 by CEO Sarig and Ziv Karliner, Pillar is developing a platform that automatically maps all AI-related assets across an organization – from models and datasets to prompts, notebooks and frameworks – to secure applications from development to production. The platform is powered by research-driven threat intelligence based on the analysis of insights from over 50 million AI application interactions.
“Security can no longer respond to technological advances, it must be foundational, woven into the very fabric of the AI development lifecycle,” said Sarig. “Our platform helps teams spot, understand, and address security risks at every stage in the lifecycle, with a continuous and automated approach.”
“This gives organizations the confidence to move fast while staying safe, unlocking AI’s true potential,” he added.
Among Pillar’s customers are tech companies Similarweb, Eleos Health and AvidXchange.
The startup cited a recent Deloitte survey of 1,200 chief information security officers, which showed that 77 percent of respondents expressed concern about the risks and threat landscape of generative AI-related technology.
The survey found that two in five organizations have experienced an AI-related security or privacy incident, and in a quarter of these cases, the threat was malicious. Among the major AI-specific risks are evasion attacks, data poisoning, data privacy and intellectual property leakage, according to the survey.
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