AI Technologies , AI-Based Cyber Defense/Cyber Offense

Intezer's $33M Series C Funding to Fuel AI, Customer Support

A company founded by an ex-Israel Defense Forces leader raised $33 million to address more types of alerts and automate the investigation process with AI.

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Intezer Labs said the Series C funding will be used to accelerate the New York-based autonomous security operations vendor's product road map and double the size of its 30-person team over the next year, particularly in R&D and customer support, according to co-founder and CEO Itai Tevet. By improving AI accuracy and speed, Intezer intends to stay ahead of efforts by attackers to refine their techniques.

"We have been struggling with keeping up with demand, to be honest, and we wanted to extend the team in order to support more customers," Tevet said. "There are a lot of market tailwinds right now that cause this demand, including global acceptance of AI as something that can really help security. Expanding our reach allows us to increase our coverage and the work we can save our customers."

How Intezer Plans to Put the $33M to Work

Intezer, founded in 2016, employs 30 people and has raised $60 million in four rounds of outside funding. The company has been led since inception by Tevet, who previously spent three years as the head of the IDF's cyber incident response team. The Series C investment was led by Norwest Venture Partners, which he said brings a level of trust and credibility to Intezer's AI-driven security technology (see: Hard-to-Detect 'Parasite' Targets Linux Operating Systems).

"Norwest is an A-list VC, so I think it puts a lot of trust in our name as well," Tevet told Information Security Media Group. "And trust is very important, especially since we're asking for prospects and customers to put faith in a technology that can really help them do what normally a person would do."

Intezer plans to use the $33 million to cover more types of security alerts and support additional alert sources to improve the company's reach and effectiveness and reduce workloads for customer security teams. The company specifically plans to add coverage for cloud security in response to client demand and expand its endpoint security coverage to go beyond Microsoft, CrowdStrike and SentinelOne.

"Today, we support Microsoft, SentinelOne and CrowdStrike. Those are the three main endpoint solutions in the U.S. market, but there are also a lot of others," Tevet said. "Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet have endpoint solutions, and so on and so forth."

Constantly improving the company's AI models is essential to maintaining the high standards of Intezer's investigation results, which he said involve quality assurance work to ensure the models are optimized for accuracy and speed. As more customers are onboarded, he said, increasing Intezer's R&D team and bringing in more AI expertise will be crucial to refining the firm's models, especially as attackers evolve.

"Every week or every day, we take a sample set of the AI investigation results and give it to a human to investigate, and then we see a lot of accuracy and speed metrics," Tevet said. "In order to ensure that our results and investigations are up to benchmarks, constant improvement needs to be made."

How Intezer Stacks Up in the Market

Intezer competes primarily with human-based outsourced managed detection and response services as well as internal security teams handling alerts in-house, he said. While big firms such as Palo Alto Networks offer AI tools for senior analysts, Tevet believes Intezer's product is different because it automates the initial stages of alert triage, which involve repetitive tasks typically handled by junior analysts.

"Definitely we see interest from large players doing AI, but it's mostly in the Copilot area for senior analysts," Tevet said. "And from a market research perspective, the biggest job shortage or talent shortage is definitely in the earlier part of the pipeline, dealing with the flood of alerts."

As Intezer goes from 30 employees today to 60 employees by the end of 2025, Tevet said the company wants to hire solution engineers who can onboard customers and ensure they're using the technology effectively. Intezer primarily serves midsized to large enterprises and managed security service providers, but Tevet said the company is seeing growing interest from midmarket clients looking for more automated solutions.

"The midmarket feels that they pay way too much money for a service that they're not so satisfied with," Tevet said. "Also, MSSPs can't cope with all the alerts that are coming from all their clients. So we help a lot of MSSPs deliver better service and also increase their own margins, business efficiency and SLAs."

Intezer's primary goal is to double revenue year over year for the next two years while keeping alert escalations at 4% and keeping an average investigation time of two minutes per alert. A human analyst would have an average investigation time of 30 minutes to four hours per alert. Tevet said this proves Intezer's effectiveness in reducing workloads for security teams while improving operational efficiency.

"Human decision-making is much more complex than just simple workflow," Tevet said. "This is the biggest breakthrough that we and other companies in our category provide, which is to simulate that decision-making of a human being when they investigate an alert. And that's what's different, the technology that enables that part."