Exaforce raises $125 million Series B at $725 million valuation

Exaforce, a three-year-old cybersecurity startup, has raised a $125 million Series B round, which represents a startup’s second major round of venture capital financing. The funding round valued the company at $725 million. This latest injection of capital brings Exaforce’s total funding to $200 million, following a $75 million Series A round raised one year prior. The capital injection highlights the high cost of building and selling its platform. Investors participating in the Series B round included HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, and Seligman Ventures.

The startup uses AI agents, which it calls Exabots, to automate security operations. This technology is positioned as a defense as bad actors weaponize AI to exploit software vulnerabilities. For co-founder and CEO Ankur Singla, the mission is to apply AI to catch and stop threats as they happen, describing it as a simple mandate that is complex to execute. To address the high volume of false positives that overwhelm security analysts, Exaforce recently introduced a feature called vibe hunting. This feature allows security teams to query the platform using natural language to investigate potential threats based on simple hunches. For example, Singla noted, “With vibe hunting, you can ask a very simple hypothesis like, ‘Did we get any new attacks from Iran?’” Umesh Padval, a managing partner at Seligman Ventures, highlighted the challenge of alert fatigue, noting that security operations personnel receive hundreds of alerts and must determine which are real, high-priority threats.

Exaforce officially brought its product to market in the fourth quarter of last year, following two years of testing with design partners. Since then, the company has onboarded 20 customers, including Replit and Guardant Health. Exaforce claims its AI platform can reduce manual, time-consuming tasks by as much as 90%. Singla stated that customer demand has shifted from questioning the need for the technology to asking how to operationalize it. Based on this demand, Singla expects to reach 40 to 50 customers by the year’s end.

The startup faces competition from other security startups applying AI to operations, including 7AI, Dropzone AI, and Prophet Security, as well as Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.

Why it matters

The influx of capital underscores both the high cost of building and selling an AI-enabled security operations center (SOC)—the centralized facility used to manage an organization’s security posture—and the massive market opportunity investors see in the space.