Cyber security
Representative image UNSPLASH

Zealot, a company building artificial intelligence infrastructure for cyber operations, announced today that it has raised $20 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures to help US and allied governments identify and address weaknesses in software and networks more efficiently.

In the last twelve months, Anthropic and OpenAI have published threat reports documenting attempts by adversarial state-aligned actors to use commercial AI models to accelerate and autonomously drive cyber kill chains, from reconnaissance and phishing to malware development and network lateral movement. The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned that AI‑enabled tools are allowing attackers to identify and exploit vulnerabilities instantly, eliminating the barrier to mount cyberattacks.

"Our adversaries are already using advanced AI to mount cyberattacks, as recent disclosures have shown," Yuval Steuer, Zealot's co-founder and CEO, said. "Democracies are looking for long-term partners to help transition from human led operations to AI led. Protecting democratic societies requires a decisive edge in cyber operations, and Zealot exists to make sure the West has that edge."

Zealot's answer is to treat that edge as a problem of infrastructure rather than of any single tool. Real security research depends on the systems that let a team go deep on the problems that require human judgment, Aviv Yahav, one of the company's principal security researchers said. "That is what we are building."

"Our priority is giving a small, deliberate team everything it needs to deliver across our U.S. and international footprint at Silicon Valley's pace," said Avi Srivastava, who serves as director of operations across Zealot's U.S. and international entities

Zealot enters a category that has drawn growing venture interest as software and AI reshape defense procurement. Defense tech has become one of venture capital's fastest-growing markets. Much of that money has gone toward hardware: drones, autonomous aircraft, weapons systems, space infrastructure, and the industrial base needed to build them. But on the software side, and especially in cyber, some founders believe there is still a large part of the national security stack that has not been rebuilt for the AI era. "Zealot's positioning is closer to long-running research infrastructure than point tooling,"according to Director of Vulnerability Research, Bar Mazuz, "our goal is to give Western governments a durable platform rather than a single capability"

Khosla Ventures, the round's lead, has been an active investor across the AI stack, including in frontier model labs and applied AI infrastructure. The company is keeping product specifics limited at this stage. According to Steuer "the round will supercharge product development and global expansion as Zealot equips the Free World to push the capability frontier in the age of AI."