The first Edge Security Management (ESM) to modernize 30-year-old legacy WAF technology, with TikTok and global brands as early enterprise customers
Huskeys, an Edge Security Management (ESM) company, emerged from stealth with $8 million in seed funding to solve a problem that has been hiding in plain sight for decades: the fundamental failure of web application security, which still relies on legacy technologies that lack the connectivity, context, and automation required to keep pace with today’s dynamic environments.
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“Web traffic has shifted from humans to APIs and now to automated agents, making it harder than ever to distinguish between legitimate and malicious activity,” said Itai Gafni, CEO and co-founder of Huskeys. “Security teams have essentially given up on making their WAF effective because the trade-off is too high. In almost every call, we hear the same thing: ‘I don’t want to touch it.’ You either block legitimate customers and lose revenue or leave the doors open to modern attacks. It’s a doomsday choice no one should have to make.”
Teams have been suffering under this status quo for years. But as apps become more dynamic and AI-powered, with new features shipping by the minute, it’s only getting worse. Complexity is exploding. Chaos is growing. And now, the price is simply too high.
As the first to bridge this gap, Huskeys is transforming the ‘doomsday’ reality into autonomous, revenue-driving advantage, with the launch of the industry’s first ESM platform. Its patent-pending technology integrates an agentic layer across the entire edge security stack. Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, Huskeys sits on top of it, with a simple plug-and-play deployment that works across multi-cloud and multi-WAF environments.
Acting as ‘the brain,’ the intelligence control plane for the edge, it unifies the flow of CDN-WAF-Infra-App into one cohesive layer. Their AI engine abstracts provider-specific syntax, enriches it with the organization’s environment context, and applies AI-driven analysis of traffic behavior, business logic, and risk. The platform continuously assesses, adapts, and orchestrates rules, policies, and configurations, optimizing for both security and business outcomes, finally aligning security with the speed of modern applications.
Itai emphasized that Huskeys is not just another security tool, but a true business asset for organizations that rely on web traffic as a core revenue driver. “Huskeys was built to integrate within minutes and deliver value within hours, not weeks. Now teams can stop guessing and turn their WAF from a business blocker into a revenue generator.”
The platform is already working with dozens of global companies, including some of the world’s leading brands such as TikTok, Merlin Entertainments, and Hugging Face. In one customer case study, Huskeys’ engine identified overly aggressive, vendor-managed WAF rules that were blocking legitimate customers from completing purchases on an e-commerce site. By recommending precise rule changes, Huskeys eliminated false positives and restored millions in revenue in hours.
Huskeys was founded in 2025 by Itai Gafni (CEO) and Roy Weisfeld (CTO), both Unit 8200 alumni. Gafni previously led AI innovation within Unit 8200, while Weisfeld worked as a security researcher focused on web hacking in complex hybrid environments.
Gafni and Weisfeld came together around a shared frustration: despite years of innovation in security tooling, web application protection had remained fragmented, static, and largely disconnected from real business impact.
“We met while working on a mutual project that used AI to enhance web hacking to bypass the most common WAF vendors, and it was shocking how easily we were able to bypass every existing solution,” said Roy Weisfeld, co-founder and CTO of Huskeys. “Their effectiveness was essentially zero.”
The round features a prestigious and diverse group of investors, intended to provide strategic value beyond a typical financing round. Participants include venture capital firms 10D, SV Angel, toDay Ventures (part of Merlin Ventures), CCL, and Alumni Ventures, along with prominent cybersecurity angels like Ariel Maislos, Michael Dolinsky, Benny Schnaider, Ofer Ben-Noon, Maty Siman, and Slavik Markovich. The round also includes participation from more than 30 CISOs from some of the world’s leading companies.
To drive global brand recognition, the investor base also includes individual angel athletes such as soccer player Mario Götze, NFL player Kelvin Beachum, and 2026 NFL Hall of Famer Larry Fitzgerald, as well as The Players Fund, which is backed by Premier League and international stars, a venture partner of the Juventus Football Club, and Como 1907 stakeholders.
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