Daylight raises $33M from Craft Ventures to redefine cyber defense with agentic AI

Cybersecurity is getting a wake-up call, and it’s coming from a company that believes AI agents should be running the frontlines of digital defense. Daylight, a Tel Aviv–based cybersecurity startup founded by Unit 8200 veterans Hagai Shapira and Eldad Rodich, just raised $33 million in Series A funding led by Craft Ventures, the firm behind SpaceX.

The round also drew participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Maple VC, and several big names from the cybersecurity community — including founders from Wiz, Torq, Cyera, Armis, and EON — bringing Daylight’s total funding to $40 million.

The fresh capital comes just months after its seed round, one of the fastest follow-on raises in cybersecurity this year. The company plans to use the funding to expand across the U.S., grow its AI-driven security operations platform, and launch new modules focused on identity threat response and cloud workload protection.

Backed by Craft Ventures, Cybersecurity Startup Daylight Secures $33M to Launch a New Era of Agentic Security

Daylight calls what it’s building Managed Agentic Security Services (MASS) — a new category that blends automation with human oversight. The concept is simple: let AI agents handle the grunt work of detection and response, while expert analysts guide and refine their actions. The result, according to Daylight, is up to a 90% reduction in false positives and faster containment of real threats.

As ransomware, phishing, and AI-driven attacks surge nearly 50% year over year, traditional managed detection and response (MDR) systems are struggling to keep up. They’re often slow to deploy, fragmented, and too reliant on manual effort. That gap has opened the door for Daylight’s platform, which deploys in under an hour and integrates with any cloud or on-premise system.

“Cyber threats are evolving faster than traditional SOC and MDR services can handle,” said Hagai Shapira, CEO and co-founder of Daylight. “We built Daylight to deliver a new level of managed protection services that respond with the speed and precision of AI, guided by human expertise. Having the support of some of the industry’s top founders and global investors strengthens our belief that this is where the future of cybersecurity is headed. The detection and response market is being reinvented, and Daylight is proud to be leading that change.”

The company’s AI-native platform works around the clock, analyzing incidents, learning from each investigation, and acting autonomously under human supervision. It’s already being used by enterprises across the U.S. and Europe, including The Motley Fool, Cresta, and McKinsey Investment Office.

“Security leaders are eager to integrate GenAI and agents within their operations. Daylight’s MDR is a turnkey, high-impact way to accomplish that, with dozens of organizations already on board,” said Kevin Gabura, principal at Craft Ventures. “Agent-native MDR is just the beginning of Hagai and Eldad’s ambitious vision for creating a new category of Managed Agentic Security Services, or MASS, and we’re excited to partner with them to achieve this vision.”

For now, Daylight stands at the intersection of human expertise and AI autonomy — a space many in the cybersecurity field are still trying to figure out. Its founders believe that the next wave of protection will depend on how well machines can think like analysts and act faster than attackers. If their approach continues to deliver the kind of results early adopters are seeing, Daylight might not just be building a company — it could be shaping the future architecture of cybersecurity itself.