Israeli-founded Surf AI exits stealth with $57M to automate enterprise security ops
Israeli-founded cybersecurity startup Surf AI launched out of stealth on Tuesday with $57 million in combined seed and Series A funding, aiming to help enterprise security teams automate remediation across cloud, identity and application environments.
The round was led by Accel Partners, with participation from Cyberstarts and Boldstart Ventures, the company told Axios Pro.
Co-founder and CEO Yair Grindlinger is a veteran cybersecurity entrepreneur. He previously co-founded FireLayers, a cloud security startup that was acquired by Proofpoint in 2016, where he subsequently served as Senior Vice President running the cloud division.
We built Surf AI because we believe modern security teams deserve tools and systems that work as hard as they do. Our platform empowers teams to monitor continuously and act decisively, even as data environments grow more complex, Grindlinger said.
The startup platform aggregates signals from identity providers, cloud services, security monitoring tools, HR platforms and IT management systems to build a contextual graph connecting assets, users, roles and infrastructure. AI agents then analyze the combined dataset to identify exposure conditions and correlate them with operational context.
The system assigns tasks to specialized AI agents that can trigger actions or propose remediation steps based on defined policies, prioritizing issues by asset criticality, permissions and business ownership. Human oversight remains for approvals, with the platform tracking activity to maintain context across sessions.
In early deployments, the platform has handled reducing unused software licenses, enforcing identity governance policies and resolving configuration risks from dormant or orphaned accounts.
Philippe Botteri, a partner at Accel, said: AI is dramatically increasing the speed and sophistication of attackers, and security teams need fundamentally new operating models to keep up.
The company was founded in 2024.