Cybersecurity firm Astelia just raised $35 million. Its founder says AI has changed the game — and young people need to befriend it.

Artificial intelligence has supercharged the cybersecurity arms race. Attackers are rushing to harness the tech to break into systems, leaving defenders no choice but to adopt it as well to fend them off.

Alon Noy, who previously led an Israeli intelligence unit that tested the nation's cyber defenses, saw that paradigm shift as an irresistible opportunity to wield his cybersecurity skills and "protect the world," he told Business Insider in an exclusive interview this week.

Noy is the CEO and cofounder of Astelia, a cybersecurity startup that uses AI to analyze an enterprise's systems, identify the tiny fraction of vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit, and help plug those holes in its defenses.

Astelia announced on Tuesday that it has raised $35 million in a combined seed and Series A funding round led by Index Ventures and Team8.

Noy spoke to Business Insider about why he thinks Astelia is the perfect bulwark against a new generation of cybersecurity threats, how he plans to use his investors' cash, and how young people can get ahead in the AI era.

He said that stress-testing Israel's critical infrastructure defenses helped him realize the value of being able to "think like an attacker."

Noy's cofounders, Nadav Ostrovsky and Roy Rajwan, also worked on Israel's National Red Team, mimicking attackers to test the country's critical infrastructure defenses.

Astelia cofounders Roy Rajwan (left), Alon Noy (middle), and Nadav Ostrovsky. Astelia

Noy explained that advances in AI have dramatically increased the number of vulnerabilities in an enterprise's computer systems and radically reduced the time needed to exploit them.

That creates a "bad equation between the attackers and defenders," he said. When attackers use AI tools to rapidly identify and exploit vulnerabilities, defenders with only traditional tools "have no chance to win the race," he added.

Noy said a key challenge is that many enterprises have "endless backlogs of vulnerabilities" but limited resources to address them. He added that it's close to "mission impossible" to find the "needles in the haystack" — the vulnerabilities that are truly exploitable.

Astelia combines AI agents with network and environment analysis of a customer's systems to pinpoint the 1% or 2% of vulnerabilities that are genuinely risky, he said.

The company can preemptively spot holes in a security system before they're ever exploited, which is "super valuable for customers," Noy said.

He gave the example of a telecoms business that had a few million vulnerabilities in its backlog and no idea how to prioritize them. Astelia pinpointed the few hundred of those that posed genuine threats and helped tackle them, he said.

Money in the bank

Noy said he would use the fresh funds to ramp up Astelia's go-to-market team and bolster its R&D team. He said the startup would likely double in headcount by the end of this year, from around 30 people today to between 60 and 70 by December's close.

Juriaan Duizendstraal, a partner at Index Ventures, said in a press release announcing the raise that AI is forcing enterprises to shift from "assumed risk to provable exposure," and Astelia helps them to "turn vulnerability management from a reactive scramble into a preemptive defense."

Amir Zilberstein, a managing partner at Team8, wrote that his firm invested in part because of the Astelia team's "rare understanding of how security failures emerge in real environments."

"Astelia cuts through vulnerability noise by grounding decisions in real exposure, and we believe this team is redefining how enterprises operationalize security," he added.

Big picture

Noy also spoke to Business Insider about how AI is changing the wider world.

He said the immense buzz around the tech is justified, but companies won't succeed long-term by simply using AI. They need to have a "moat" to fend off competitors, such as access to proprietary data, he said.

Noy cautioned that many people are too relaxed about uploading personal information to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, as they don't realize their sensitive data could be used to train the models, or consider that it might be leaked.

He also offered advice to young people worried about an affordability crisis and AI replacing humans in many jobs.

Noy recommended they become "good friends with AI" and use it for everything from coding to planning, shopping, messaging, and managing tasks.

He said that could help them stay updated on the tech's latest abilities and shortcomings, and keep up with a fast-changing market, instead of getting "left behind."