Blackstone invests $27M in Israeli startup Huskeys’ Series A to tackle AI-agent traffic

A cybersecurity company that didn’t exist two years ago just pulled in $27 million from one of the largest alternative asset managers on the planet. Blackstone Innovations Investments led the Series A round for Huskeys, a Tel Aviv-based startup building security tools designed to handle a problem most companies are only starting to understand: the tsunami of AI-generated web traffic now slamming into corporate networks.

The round closed around September 2, 2026, pushing Huskeys’ total funding to $35 million and its valuation past the $100 million mark. For a company founded in 2025, that’s a remarkably steep trajectory.

What Huskeys actually does

The core product sits in a category Huskeys calls Network Edge Security Management, or NESM. Think of it as a smart wrapper around the web application firewalls (WAFs) and edge services that companies already have deployed.

Huskeys’ platform adds what the company describes as an “agentic AI layer” on top of those existing defenses. Rather than ripping out infrastructure, the system augments it, analyzing traffic patterns to distinguish between helpful AI agents and malicious ones. The company says it processes over a trillion web requests daily across its client base, managing thousands of network configurations in real time.

Who’s backing the bet

Blackstone wasn’t alone in the round. Skinos Ventures, Zscaler Ventures, and Okta Ventures all participated, along with individual investors from Google, Microsoft, and Intel.

The $27 million Series A follows an $8 million seed round completed in March 2026. That seed-to-Series-A timeline of roughly six months signals aggressive growth and, presumably, early traction that convinced investors to move fast.

Huskeys was co-founded by Itai Gafni and Roy Weisfeld, both graduates of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence unit. Unit 8200 is the Israeli Defense Forces’ signals intelligence operation, and it has become something of a startup incubator in its own right. Alumni have gone on to build companies across the cybersecurity and enterprise software landscape, including Check Point, Wiz, and dozens of others that have collectively generated billions in exits.

The client list tells a story

Perhaps the most compelling data point isn’t the funding amount but the roster of organizations already using the platform. Huskeys counts TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Hugging Face, and Blackstone itself among its customers.

That last one is interesting. Blackstone isn’t just writing a check. It’s using the product. When an investor becomes a customer before becoming a backer, it usually means the technology cleared an internal due diligence bar that’s far higher than a typical pitch deck review.

Hugging Face’s presence on the client list also makes sense. As one of the most popular platforms for hosting and deploying AI models, it sits at the epicenter of the AI-agent traffic explosion. If any company needs tools to manage autonomous bot requests at scale, it’s an open-source AI hub processing millions of model downloads and API calls.