Blackstone Bets $27M on Huskeys: The Agentic AI Firewall Layer for an Internet Run by Bots

Israeli cybersecurity startup Huskeys has raised a $27 million Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments, valuing the company at more than $100 million and bringing its total funding to $35 million. The round, announced today, is one of the clearest signals yet that investors believe the next great cybersecurity category will be built around a simple, unsettling premise: most of the traffic arriving at your website is no longer human.

What Huskeys Actually Does

Huskeys operates at the web application firewall (WAF) layer — a security technology pioneered in Israel nearly 30 years ago to filter traffic for individual applications as the internet expanded. The company’s core argument is that this layer has barely evolved since: WAFs still inspect requests much as they did decades ago, while the nature of internet traffic has undergone a fundamental shift.

The platform adds an agentic AI layer on top of existing edge infrastructure. Rather than forcing enterprises to rip out and replace their current WAFs and CDNs, Huskeys connects to and orchestrates them — continuously assessing traffic behavior, business logic, and risk, then adapting security rules in real time. Its AI engine identifies which traffic is legitimate, which is malicious, and which of an organization’s own overly aggressive WAF rules are accidentally blocking real customers from completing purchases.

The timing is not accidental. AI crawlers, scrapers, and autonomous agents now account for a rapidly growing share of all web traffic — Fastly’s threat research found AI crawlers make up almost 80% of AI bot traffic, and industry surveys suggest organizations systematically underestimate how much of their traffic is automated. These bots drive massive unplanned traffic spikes that degrade performance for legitimate users, inflate infrastructure costs, and scrape proprietary content at scale.

The Funding Round in Detail

The $27 million round was led by Blackstone Innovations Investments, with participation from Skinos Ventures, Yishay Yovel, the strategic investment funds of Okta and Zscaler, and Merlin Ventures. Notably, senior executives from across the cybersecurity establishment — including leaders from Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, and Intel — also invested personally.

The participation of Okta’s and Zscaler’s corporate venture funds comes paired with strategic partnerships aimed at deepening integration between Huskeys’ edge security layer and the broader identity and network security stack. In an ecosystem where deployment friction kills young security products, distribution alliances with two of the largest security vendors are arguably worth as much as the capital itself.

The round also featured some unconventional backers: actor and comedian Assi Cohen, and mentalist Lior Suchard, who also serves as an adviser to the company.

Founders With Unit 8200 Pedigree

Huskeys was founded by CEO Itai Gafni and CTO Roy Weissfeld, both alumni of Israel’s Unit 8200 signals intelligence corps. Gafni previously led artificial intelligence initiatives within the unit, while Weissfeld worked as a security researcher focused specifically on web security — a founder-market fit that maps precisely onto the company’s product: AI-driven analysis applied to web traffic defense.

Since emerging from stealth roughly five months ago with an $8 million seed led by 10D Ventures, the company has expanded internationally and built a customer base that reads like a cross-section of the internet economy: TikTok, Legoland, Ro, Hugging Face, and Blackstone itself — a rare case of a lead investor also being a customer.

Why This Matters: Security for the Agentic Internet

CEO Itai Gafni framed the company’s thesis in stark terms: “Artificial intelligence has changed the way the internet works, and along with tremendous opportunities, it has also brought new security risks and the potential to damage organizations’ revenues. We believe that in the near future, most identities operating on the internet will be autonomous agents, and organizations will need a new infrastructure that can identify, secure and manage them.”

That framing — managing agent identities, not just blocking bot traffic — points at where the industry is heading. Today’s problem is largely defensive: unwanted scrapers, aggressive crawlers, and DDoS-style traffic spikes driven by AI. Tomorrow’s problem is far more complex. As AI agents begin transacting on behalf of users — booking, buying, comparing, negotiating — organizations will need to distinguish legitimate agents from malicious ones, grant them appropriate permissions, and audit what they do. The WAF that merely blocks “bad traffic” becomes inadequate when the traffic itself is the customer.

Huskeys is positioning itself as the category-defining player for this transition, and the investor list suggests the cybersecurity establishment agrees the category is real. The competitive window will not stay open long: every major WAF and CDN vendor is racing to bolt agentic AI onto their own platforms, and adjacent startups — like the six-month-old AIR Security, which raised $50 million to build a firewall specifically for AI agents — are attacking the problem from the agent side.

What Huskeys has going for it is the pragmatism of its approach. Modernizing what enterprises already own, rather than demanding replacement, has historically been the fastest route into large security budgets. Whether an orchestration layer can remain independent as the underlying WAF and CDN vendors add their own AI capabilities is the existential question — but with $35 million in total funding, deep-pocketed strategic partners, and customers at the scale of TikTok, Huskeys has bought itself a serious runway to answer it.

The broader signal for the industry is unmistakable: the era of securing a human internet is ending. The capital markets are now explicitly pricing in an internet where the majority of actors are machines — and funding the infrastructure to keep that internet safe.