Exaforce raises $125 million Series B to combat AI-powered cyber threats with real-time detection

Exaforce raises $125M Series B to build AI for catching and stopping cyberattacks as they happen | TechCrunch

As bad actors weaponize AI to exploit software vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed, companies are increasingly recognizing the need to bolster their cybersecurity defenses. Fortunately, those very AI tools are also helping businesses fight back. The need for such capabilities has helped Exaforce, an AI startup that detects and thwarts 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 a year after Exaforce raised a $75 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $200 million. The influx of capital underscores both the high cost of building and selling an AI-enabled security operations center (SOC), and the massive market opportunity investors see in the space. Exaforce says it uses AI agents, called "Exabots," with deep data analysis to automate security operations, taking the heavy lifting off of human analysts. For the startup's co-founder and CEO Ankur Singla, the mission is straightforward: Apply AI to catch and stop threats as they happen. "It's a very simple mandate, but it's very complex to execute," he said. The real challenge for security teams is that the vast majority of threat alerts are false positives. "A security operations person gets hundreds of alerts. How do you know what is a real, high-priority alert?" said Umesh Padval, a managing partner at Seligman Ventures, comparing the work of security teams to looking for a needle in a haystack. Exaforce claims its AI platform can reduce manual, time-consuming tasks by as much as 90%. Recognizing the rise in cyberattacks, the startup recently introduced "vibe hunting," a feature that lets security teams query its AI platform with natural language to investigate potential attacks based on simple hunches. "With vibe hunting, you can ask a very simple hypothesis like, 'Did we get any new attacks from Iran?'" Singla said. Exaforce officially brought its product to market in the fourth quarter of last year, following two years of testing with design partners. The startup has since added 20 customers, including notable names like Replit and Guardant Health. Due to the rise in cyberattacks, Singla told TechCrunch that Exaforce expects to reach 40 to 50 customers by the year's end. High-profile attacks have "supercharged our ability to get to customers, because the customers now don't ask, 'why do I need this?'" Singla said. The question he is hearing more often now is: "How do I operationalize it?" Exaforce isn't alone in 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.

Exaforce Raises $125M Series B to Combat AI-Powered Attacks with Real-Time Security Reasoning

Exaforce's real-time knowledge graph gives security teams the speed, context, and reasoning needed to detect, triage, investigate, and respond to AI-era threats. SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 12, 2026-- Exaforce, the pioneer in agentic security operations, today announced a $125 million Series B financing round, one of the largest ever in the emerging AI SOC space. The round includes participation from HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, Seligman Ventures and AICONIC. The new capital will help Exaforce scale its AI-native security operations platform, deepen its real-time reasoning capabilities, and expand globally. Coming just one year after its $75 million Series A, the round brings Exaforce's total funding to $200 million. AI is reshaping the threat landscape, and security operations must keep pace As AI-driven attack methods accelerate and zero-day threats proliferate, security teams need systems that can detect and respond faster than humans can keep up. Exaforce is designed for that reality, where speed, context, and consistent reasoning are non-negotiable. Its real-time knowledge graph goes beyond alert triage, helping security teams detect attacks as they unfold. "We built Exaforce to be the platform defenders actually work in, not just an AI layer on top of existing tools," said Ankur Singla, CEO of Exaforce. "It starts with a real-time knowledge graph that gives agents complete context from the start, and extends into rich investigation and visualization experiences that put security engineers and AI agents on the same page. This funding lets us deepen that platform and bring it to security teams on a global scale." A differentiated approach to AI-native security operations In a market where many AI SOC products focus on triaging alerts after they trigger, Exaforce takes a fundamentally different approach. It treats security operations as a real-time data architecture problem, not just an agent orchestration problem. Most AI-enabled SIEMs and AI SOC triage tools ask agents to reconstruct context during an investigation, querying logs, calling APIs, correlating signals, and reasoning after the fact. On a typical investigation, these systems may require hundreds of queries and many minutes to reach a conclusion, spending tokens and time at every step. Exaforce instead builds and maintains a real-time security knowledge graph at ingest, connecting security events, identities, permissions, configurations, code, files, and cloud activity as they arrive. Its agents answer the same investigative questions in under a minute, a 10x reduction in time and a significant reduction in tokens per investigation, because the relevant context is retrieved, not reconstructed. Correlating at ingest is what makes both real-time triage and detection possible. Correlating at query time, by definition, cannot. This architecture also improves reasoning quality. Because every event is chained to its identity, every resource is linked to its readers, writers, and permissions, agents follow real relationships rather than inferring them on demand from fragmented logs and APIs. That means fewer false positives, higher-fidelity detections, and response recommendations that security teams can act on with confidence. "After actively evaluating several options, we went with Exaforce as our AI-native security platform and modern SIEM, backed by their MDR service for 24/7 expert coverage," said Patrick McKinney, Vice President of Security at Invisible. "What set them apart was the ability to unlock the full value of our data, from enriched event ingestion to detection, response, and automation, all within a single platform. The combination of AI-driven efficiency and the added expertise of their MDR team has helped us scale more effectively without overextending resources. Exaforce feels less like a vendor and more like a true security partner, and we're on a clear path to expanding use cases together." Customer momentum and investor conviction "The biggest opportunity in enterprise security is flipping the economics, so that defenders, not attackers, hold the leverage," said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures and an investor in Exaforce. "When the cost of defense drops by an order of magnitude, the entire calculus of security changes. Exaforce is the architecture that makes that possible." In the past year, the company grew to over 130 employees and processed millions of investigations across its growing customer base. With recent product announcements like Vibe Hunting and measurable customer outcomes across detection, investigation, and response, the approach is resonating with organizations looking to stay ahead of increasingly fast and adaptive adversaries. "As a biotech company, safeguarding highly sensitive data is a constant priority, especially in a landscape shaped by faster, AI-driven attacks," said Steve Mancini, CISO at Guardant Health. "With Exaforce's Exabots, we've accelerated detection, threat hunting, response, and investigations while expanding coverage without adding headcount. Our team uses Exabot's natural language search to get actionable answers about security events and security posture in a single tool instead of juggling disparate interfaces and query languages. Exaforce has become a high-trust partner, and the platform has transformed how we run security operations." What comes next The funding comes as security operations shifts from human-led triage toward AI-native systems that reason over live security context and respond in real time. Exaforce will use the Series B funding to advance its core platform, including multi-model AI and its real-time knowledge graph, while expanding the capabilities security teams need to investigate, detect, and respond at machine speed. The company will also expand its global footprint, with go-to-market investment across key regions including Japan and Europe. In parallel, Exaforce will continue investing in customer success, research, MDR oversight, and support to help customers operationalize the platform and improve response speed, resilience, and confidence across critical environments. About Exaforce Exaforce is the pioneer in agentic security operations. Its AI-native platform combines a real-time security knowledge graph with AI agents (Exabots). It is supported by an MDR service that helps teams detect, triage, investigate, and respond to threats at machine speed. Backed by $200 million in total funding from HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, and Seligman Ventures, Exaforce serves security teams at enterprises across healthcare, technology, financial services, and other high-target industries. The company is headquartered in the Bay Area with a growing global presence. Learn more at www.exaforce.com View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260512993333/en/

Agentic SOC startup Exaforce closes $125M round at reported $725M valuation - SiliconANGLE

Agentic SOC startup Exaforce closes $125M round at reported $725M valuation Agentic security operations startup Exaforce Inc. today announced that it has raised $125 million in new funding to scale its AI-driven security operations platform and expand its real-time threat reasoning capabilities. While not confirmed directly by Exaforce, TechCrunch reports that the round was raised at a valuation of $725 million. Founded in 2023, Exaforce sells what it calls an agentic security operations platform. The product combines a real-time security knowledge graph with AI agents the company calls Exabots and is supported by a managed detection and response service that monitors customer environments around the clock. The company argues that conventional AI-enabled security information and event management tools, along with newer AI SOC triage products, force agents to reconstruct context every time an alert fires. That process involves querying logs, calling application programming interfaces and correlating signals after the fact, sometimes requiring hundreds of queries per investigation. Exaforce instead builds a security knowledge graph at the point of data ingestion, linking events, identities, permissions, configurations, code, files and cloud activity as they arrive. The company claims its agents can answer investigative questions in under a minute, a 10-times reduction over query-time approaches, while consuming fewer tokens per investigation. The architecture also produces fewer false positives because agents follow real relationships between events rather than inferring them on demand. "We built Exaforce to be the platform defenders actually work in, not just an AI layer on top of existing tools," said Ankur Singla, chief executive of Exaforce, in a statement. "It starts with a real-time knowledge graph that gives agents complete context from the start and extends into rich investigation and visualization experiences that put security engineers and AI agents on the same page." Exaforce has seen strong growth and has increased its headcount to more than 130 employees over the past year and has processed millions of investigations across its customer base. The Series B round was backed by HarbourVest Partners, Peak XV Partners, Mayfield Fund, Khosla Ventures, Seligman Ventures and AICONIC. Exaforce plans to use the funds to advance its core platform, including multi-model AI development and to expand its go-to-market presence in Japan and Europe. "The biggest opportunity in enterprise security is flipping the economics so that defenders, not attackers, hold the leverage," said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. "When the cost of defense drops by an order of magnitude, the entire calculus of security changes." The round was described by Exaforce as one of the largest ever in the emerging AI security operations center market and comes just over a year after Exaforce raised $75 million Series A. Including the new round today, the company has now raised $200 million in funding.