The next major security challenge for internet-facing applications may not simply be identifying malicious traffic. It may be understanding which automated traffic should be allowed in the first place.
AI agents are creating new forms of legitimate, autonomous interaction with applications, while attackers are using AI-driven capabilities to discover and exploit vulnerabilities faster. At the same time, organizations are managing applications across increasingly fragmented combinations of cloud providers, CDNs, web application firewalls and other edge technologies.
That convergence is creating a more complicated environment for cybersecurity teams. It is also the opportunity Huskeys is pursuing with a $27 million Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments. The funding, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, brings the company’s total funding to $35 million, including an earlier $8 million seed round.
Other participants in the round include Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures, Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel, along with individual investors including WAF and CAPTCHA inventor Eran Reshef and executives from organizations including Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, Google, Microsoft and Intel.
AI Is Complicating an Already Difficult Traffic Problem
Security systems have long been responsible for separating legitimate users from malicious actors. But the emergence of AI agents adds another category of traffic that organizations must understand and manage.
Autonomous agents can legitimately interact with applications, creating new patterns that may not fit traditional assumptions about users or automated traffic. At the same time, attackers are increasingly using AI-driven capabilities to accelerate vulnerability discovery and exploitation.
The challenge for organizations is not simply to block more traffic. They must protect applications while minimizing false positives and maintaining business continuity.
The problem becomes more difficult when security controls are distributed across multiple technologies. A single organization may rely on different providers and products to manage its cloud infrastructure, internet traffic and application security.
A Management Platform for a Fragmented Environment
Huskeys is building a category it calls Network Edge Security Management, or NESM. The platform is designed to provide a unified intelligence and control layer across the technologies organizations already use at the network edge.
Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, the company connects and orchestrates CDNs, WAFs, cloud-native security solutions and network components including load balancers, VPCs and security groups.
Its patented Unified Data Model is intended to create a common layer of understanding across those different environments and providers. That, in turn, enables security insights, policies and actions to move across platforms.
The company also provides continuous posture assessment, dynamic policy generation, orchestration and Virtual Patching. The Virtual Patching capability allows security teams to mitigate vulnerabilities at the network edge while a permanent fix is being developed, tested and deployed within the application.
“We founded Huskeys because security teams are being asked to protect increasingly complex edge environments with legacy tools that were never designed to work together or to address the challenges of the new AI era,” said Itai Gafni, CEO and Co-Founder of Huskeys. “Every business today runs through its network edge – that’s where your customers, your revenue, and your threats all meet, yet for most organizations, that edge works against them instead of for them. As AI transforms both legitimate traffic and cyberattacks, organizations need an intelligence layer that continuously understands what’s happening across the edge and adapts security in real time. Our goal is to make the network finally work for the business, not against it. That’s the category we’re building.”
Why Blackstone Is Investing
Huskeys says its customer base includes TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Blackstone and Hugging Face, and that it analyzes more than a trillion web requests and thousands of network configurations every day across organizations worldwide.
The company’s argument is that the network edge is becoming too complex to manage effectively through disconnected security controls, particularly as AI changes both legitimate and malicious internet traffic.
“The way organizations secure internet-facing applications is fundamentally changing. AI-driven traffic and increasingly fragmented edge environments require a new approach to security management,” said Adam Fletcher, Chief Information Security Officer at Blackstone. “Huskeys has built a platform designed to operate at enterprise scale while advancing a new category for the modern network edge. We believe the company is well positioned to redefine how organizations manage edge security, and we’re excited to support Huskeys as they continue to develop their product in this important category.”
As AI creates new forms of interaction between users, applications and autonomous systems, the boundary between legitimate and suspicious traffic may become increasingly difficult to define. Huskeys is positioning its Network Edge Security Management platform around that emerging challenge, providing organizations with a way to understand and adapt security across an increasingly complex edge.
