Mate Security Raises $35 Million in Series A Led by Microsoft's M12
Israeli cybersecurity startup Mate Security has raised $35 million in a Series A round. The funding, which includes participation from Microsoft's investment arm M12, comes just eight months after the company's initial launch.
Mate team. Photo: Company website
Information security teams in organizations are drowning today in a sea of false positives. This is not new, and sounds like an opening line in the pitch of quite a few Israeli startups. But while attackers use automated tools and advanced models to attack non-stop, even on weekends, human cyber researchers are collapsing under the load and missing critical real alerts. Traditional security systems were simply not built for the pace and complexity of the AI era.
The Israeli cyber company Mate Security is developing an open security platform based on intelligent software agents that take on the identification, investigation, and response to incidents. The basis for the technology, which is currently in the patent registration process, is what the company calls a Security Context Graph. It is a kind of organizational brain that learns the organization from the inside and knows employee permissions and business processes.
Microsoft is also in
In a conversation with Geektime, Asaf Weiner, CEO and co-founder of Mate, says that the system draws information from various sources in the organization, including Slack channels. Within just 24 hours from the moment of connection, the platform builds knowledge equivalent to that of an experienced cyber war room employee, with the graph understanding the architecture, workflows, areas of responsibility, procedures, and even which employees are currently traveling abroad. "This allows our agents to investigate based on querying the graph, with a very high level of accuracy, instead of trying to learn the organizational context in real-time when an incident occurs," explains Weiner.
The company recently also launched a continuous detection and response capability named CD/CR. Instead of just responding to incidents, the system closes false positives at the root. If at the end of an investigation it turns out that it started from a false positive, the system knows how to correct the settings so that the alert will not appear again and flood the analysts. "We know today how to take all the knowledge that our agents build during investigations, as well as knowledge accumulated from other sources, and use it to optimize alerts and close security holes on an ongoing basis," adds Weiner.
Weiner also mentions the attack case published last week in which Hugging Face was attacked by an OpenAI model that "escaped" from its Sandbox: "Dealing with a machine attack pace requires adapting the security organization exactly as Mate does. Today we not only know how to close false positives so they don't reach analysts, but we also know how to optimize the alerts themselves so they don't appear in the future."
Photo: Omer Hakohen
Beyond investigating incidents, the platform is becoming a real infrastructure system for customers who want to reduce costs. Organizations are concerned about the storage and computing costs of outdated correlation systems like SIEM. Mate allows them to transfer data to distributed and cheaper data lakes, while the company's agents access and investigate alerts directly against the information sources. In addition, the system knows how to measure how much time is wasted on idle events, and allows organizations to reduce dependence on external investigation bodies — managed security services, whose conclusions are often found to be wrong.
Microsoft is also in
Today (Tuesday), Mate announces the completion of a $35 million Series A funding round, led by Canaan Partners with the participation of existing investors Insight Partners and the Team8 fund. A new addition to the round is M12, Microsoft's investment arm, which has kept a low profile in recent years. Ori Barzilai, a partner at Team8, noted that the company is progressing at an unusual pace for the stage it is at, both on the business side and in product development, and this is especially prominent in the era of intelligent agents. The announcement of the round comes just eight months after the company's exposure and its seed round.
Why are you rushing to raise money just 8 months after the previous round?
Weiner: "We are seeing very fast growth, with a significant amount of customers, and many more interested in the product. The funding will allow us to handle the demand, continue our fast pace of growth and building, in order to build and continue to be the leading company in the field."
Mate was founded in 2025 by Asaf Weiner, Oren Saban who serves as Chief Product Officer, and Guy Fargal, Chief Technology Officer. The company currently employs 50 people, 40 of them in Israel and the rest in the United States. The total funding of the company since its establishment now stands at over $50 million.
