7AI

Founders: Lior Div, Yonatan Striem Amit
Founding: 2024
Mission: Empower security teams to do human work. Swarming agents do the rest
Employees: 35 & 100% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $36M raised
Investors: Greylock, CRV, Spark Capital
Key Customers: Coming Soon!
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $150M – $250M (assuming average equity dilution in the $36M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

7AI has built an agentic powered cybersecurity platform to arm organizations with the tools they need to defend themselves from the next generation of AI enabled attackers. Cybersecurity is evolving rapidly and 7AI is stepping into the void to help them meet this moment.

The sun was shining. It was the summer of 2023 and Lior Div was soaking it in with his family, planning for a quieter next chapter. Lior had just departed Cybereason, the cybersecurity leader he co-founded & led for 11 years as Co-Founder & CEO. He could have been an investor. Or a professor. Maybe a surfer? Or even a birdwatcher? But then his kids went back to school. What was next? 

Generative AI was taking hold and, as a former Israeli intelligence leader, Lior sees the world through a unique lens. He realized that everything about cybersecurity was about to change. Malicious actors, from nation states to smaller hacking groups, would quickly adopt large language models to scale their attacks more efficiently. 

Traditionally, cybersecurity attacks are “low and slow”. Nation states will try to hide and probe defenses over time. But with AI and agents these digital networks can 10x their volume with increased sophistication. Phishing is getting more complex. Voice AI has already allowed impersonations to be on par with real humans. This is a generational platform shift and Lior wasn’t about to miss out.

Annual cybersecurity spend is $200B+ and on track to surpass $400B by the end of the decade (src). Meanwhile, the cybersecurity workforce remains under-resourced; some estimates show 750k+ unfilled jobs in the U.S. and 3M+ worldwide (src).

Lior and his co-founder from Cybereason, Yonatan Striem Amit, have assembled a world class team with backing from Greylock, CRV & Spark to pursue a new defensive approach. After talking to 200+ CISOs from their vast network, they have built a platform of autonomous AI powered agents to automate investigative tasks and free up human experts to focus on truly strategic work.

Building truly adaptive generative AI agents – ones that can handle an array of security alerts and unify results from diverse tools – is not trivial. Many existing “AI” solutions in cybersecurity are repurposed chatbots or automated workflows that rely on fixed rules. Essentially, fancy “if-then” scripts. 7AI’s small, composable agents are powered by advanced LLMs, which can dynamically adjust to new threats without constant manual updates.

Enterprise security teams typically combine multiple endpoint detection, identity management, and threat intelligence solutions. By design, large incumbent vendors often focus on integrating AI tools only across their own products, pushing customers toward a single-vendor lock-in. 7AI, on the other hand, aims to be tool-agnostic – pulling alerts from SentinelOne or CrowdStrike just as easily as from Okta or other authentication & identity providers. This approach prioritizes flexibility for customers who run heterogeneous environments.

Ok, so how does 7AI actually work in practice?

Imagine you receive a user reported phishing email that triggers an alert. A “mission agent” recognizes this is an e-mail and then tasks multiple specialized sub-agents to examine the email header, domain origin, URLs in the body, any attachments, and/or suspicious wording like “gift cards”. We know you’ve gotten an e-mail like that or two before..

Each sub-agent (of which there are dozens) has a singular mission. The agent responsible for analyzing an attachment will “denotate” those files in a safe sandbox. The agent responsible for checking the domain will reference a catalogue of domain reputations and run semantic checks for analysis. And that’s just for an e-mail use case! 7AI deploys agents across endpoint use cases, identity, cloud, etc.

Collectively, the agents can either conclude the alert as benign or escalate it with a clear explanation of what’s wrong and suggestions for next steps. This composable, multi-agent framework preserves hu man analysts’ capacity for strategic tasks – tracking root causes, patching vulnerabilities, and planning ahead – instead of chewing through routine triage work.

Their pace of development and traction has been fast. After developing its product with around a dozen design partners in under 12 months, 7AI launched publicly this quarter (Q1 ‘25) to race into the market and build their go-to-market engine. Because why wait?

The team has grown to 35 employees and they recently moved into a 30k square foot office on St. James in Boston to scale their efforts. Perhaps a time lapse camera to capture the journey?? The big objective for 2025 is straightforward: sign a lot of customers, prove repeatability, and scale.

From a go-to-market perspective, 7AI is investing in channel partnerships with security resellers like GuidePoint to help provide distribution & prove initial value. As proof points and customer references build, these partners will begin proactively bringing 7AI into their net new opportunities. Eventually, channel-driven deals could reach a 50/50 mix with directly sourced customers, offering high leverage for fast growth.

They’re receiving early industry recognition too. The startup just secured a spot on Business Insider’s list of 43 Startups to Bet Your Career On in 2025 and submitted their entry for RSA’s Innovation Sandbox, where top cybersecurity startups compete for the title of “Most Innovative” each year. They like their chances! Lior was recently invited to the New York Stock Exchange for an on-site interview too.

Their $36M Seed fundraise in February 2024 was backed by top investors including Greylock, CRV, and Spark Capital to fuel their “service-as-software” approach. Expect more events from 7AI in the Boston startup community – CISO roundtables and curated gatherings – as well as upcoming product announcements from RSA and other industry forums where 7AI will be showcasing these agent-driven investigations in action. The future is bright…and autonomous.

Operators to Know:

• Ofir Arias, Founding Engineer
• Becca Barry, Product Manager
• Nate Burke, CMO
• Jeff Brainerd, Engineering Manager
• Allen Lieberman, Chief Product Officer
• Anna Phipps, Chief of Staff
• Nir Soudry, R&D Manager
• Anna Suslova, Head of Growth Marketing
• Owen Tanner Wilkerson, Founding Engineer

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the 7AI team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

• Senior Machine Learning Engineer
• Senior Security Analyst
• Founding Account Executive
• Founding Sales Leader

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

• What are the most important initiatives in 1H 2025?
• What are the biggest challenges as you make 7AI fully commercially available?
• What is the long term vision for the company?
• What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2025 // teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about 7AI you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more cybersecurity defenders into the age of AI. All organizations applaud your efforts. See you around town!