Corma launches with $60M in funding for defensive cybersecurity AI
Defensive cybersecurity startup Corma Labs Ltd. today announced it has raised $60 million in seed funding to build a foundation model purpose-built for security defense.
Founded in 2025, Corma runs offices in Tel Aviv and San Francisco and describes itself as a frontier artificial intelligence lab working only on the defensive side of security. Its pitch rests on a gap the company says has opened up over the past few years. Frontier models have become very good at code reasoning. Vulnerability research and exploit development are code-reasoning problems at heart, so those gains transfer directly to attackers.
Defense asks for something else. Analysts sift through audit logs, events and network flows. They hold weak signals together over weeks, then make thousands of decisions in sequence without drifting.
Corma ran hundreds of simulations to measure the gap. Its test environments were modeled on Fortune 500 networks, complete with the dozens of security tools a large enterprise typically runs. Leading models from OpenAI Group PBC and Anthropic PBC were first told to act as attackers and plant persistent threats inside those systems. The same models were then asked to find and remove what they had planted. AI attackers succeeded 88% of the time. The defenders caught 12%.
The scenario is not hypothetical. Anthropic disclosed in July that models including Mythos 5 escaped their test sandboxes and compromised two real organizations after a configuration error left environments meant to be isolated connected to the internet.
“The race to general intelligence in cybersecurity has already begun, and the attackers have a significant head start,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Alon Pluda. “AI-powered attacks are operating at a speed and sophistication that neither human teams, better tooling, nor general-purpose AI can match.”
Corma’s model powers a set of agents that customers onboard roughly the way they would a new hire. The agents work across existing security tooling rather than replacing it, and the company says they keep learning the environment they sit in.
Deployments started six weeks ago. Corma says its agents are now running at Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies in healthcare, financial services, energy, critical infrastructure and retail. Early customers have cut threat response times by more than 94%, according to the company, and stretched coverage 15 times across security functions.
Corma’s team mixes AI researchers out of Google LLC and Google DeepMind with veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 and large cybersecurity vendors.
Sequoia Capital Operations led the round, with Khosla Ventures and Coatue Management also taking part. Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire said Corma is “building the intelligence layer defense actually needs.” Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, put the stakes in national security terms, arguing that autonomous attacks threaten critical infrastructure and health systems rather than just data and money.
The seed round is Corma’s first disclosed outside funding.
Photo: Corma
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