Dream raises $260m at $3bn, tripling its value in 16 months

Israeli AI and cybersecurity firm Dream raised $260 million at a $3 billion valuation, nearly tripling its $1.1 billion valuation from 16 months ago. The round was led by Bicycle Capital and Group 11, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Antler, and Tru Arrow Partners. The company provides national-scale cyber defense to governments and critical infrastructure operators, and its rapid valuation growth reflects surging investor demand for AI-native security solutions.

Sixteen months ago, Dream was a billion-dollar company. This week it is worth three. The Israeli AI and cybersecurity firm has raised $260m in a round that valued it at $3bn, nearly tripling the $1.1bn it commanded in February 2025, a pace of revaluation that says as much about the market for defensive AI as it does about the company itself. The round was led by Bicycle Capital and Group 11, with Bain Capital Ventures, Antler, and Tru Arrow Partners also taking part. Bain had led Dream’s previous round, the $100m-plus raise that first lifted it into unicorn territory, and its return is the kind of follow-on that tends to anchor a step-up of this size. The new capital lands less than a year and a half after the last, in a sector where rounds are now stacked closer and closer together. What Dream sells is national-scale cyber defence. The company provides AI and cybersecurity services to governments and operators of critical infrastructure, the power grids, water systems, and transport networks whose compromise is a state-level rather than a corporate problem. It has positioned itself as a vendor for the part of the threat landscape where the attacker is often another government, and where the buyer is a ministry rather than a chief information security officer. The founders are a large part of the story. Dream was created by Shalev Hulio, the former chief executive and co-founder of NSO Group, the surveillance-software maker behind the Pegasus spyware that drew years of international controversy, alongside Sebastian Kurz, the former Austrian chancellor, and Gil Dolev. It is an unusual combination of a spyware veteran and a head of government, and it gives Dream a Rolodex few cybersecurity startups can match when the customers are states. The valuation fits a wider pattern in which security has become one of the most fundable corners of the AI boom. European and Israeli firms have been clearing the unicorn bar at speed, with Belgian developer-security startup Aikido reaching a $1bn valuation https://thenextweb.com/news/aikido-security-becomes-unicorn in roughly three years, and defence-focused AI drawing fresh capital into sovereign and national-security use cases. The technology underneath that current is maturing fast. Security startups are increasingly building autonomous agents that do work which used to require expensive human specialists, from AI penetration-testing agents https://thenextweb.com/news/intruder-ai-pentesting-cybersecurity-knowbe4 that compress manual security tests into minutes to systems that monitor and respond to threats without a human in the loop. For governments facing more attacks than they can staff against, that automation is the pitch, and Dream is selling it at the highest tier of the market. The funding pace also reflects a broader repricing of cybersecurity inside the AI era. As attackers begin to use generative models to write malware, automate reconnaissance, and probe systems at machine speed, the defensive side has had to answer in kind, and investors have concluded that the firms building AI-native defence are not a niche but a necessity. That conviction has compressed the time between rounds and inflated the valuations attached to them, Dream’s included. What the company has not disclosed is as telling as the round. Dream has not published revenue figures, customer counts, or the specific governments it serves, which is unsurprising for a vendor whose contracts are often classified, but which leaves outsiders reliant on the valuation as a proxy for traction. In national-security cyber, the most telling metrics are frequently the ones that never become public, and the $3bn figure is doing a lot of the talking in their absence. Dream has not detailed how it will spend the $260m, and the round leaves open the usual questions about how quickly a company selling to governments can convert a soaring valuation into the revenue that justifies it. Public-sector sales cycles are long, and national-security procurement longer still. What the figure establishes is the market’s conviction: a company defending nations against AI-enabled attacks is, for now, one investors are willing to pay almost any price to own a piece of. Get the TNW newsletter Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.