Huskeys Exits Stealth With AI to End WAF 'Doomsday Choice'

TEL AVIV, Israel – March 30, 2026 – A new cybersecurity firm, Huskeys, has emerged from stealth mode with $8 million in seed funding to confront a problem that has plagued businesses for decades: the fundamental failure of the firewalls meant to protect their web applications.
The company claims its agentic AI platform can solve the ‘doomsday choice’ that forces security teams to either block legitimate customers and lose revenue or leave their systems vulnerable to modern attacks.

For years, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) have been a cornerstone of digital defense. Yet, as applications grow more dynamic and web traffic shifts from human users to a complex mix of APIs and automated agents, these legacy systems have struggled to keep pace. The result is a constant, high-stakes trade-off.

“Security teams have essentially given up on making their WAF effective because the trade-off is too high,” said Itai Gafni, CEO and co-founder of Huskeys. “In almost every call, we hear the same thing: ‘I don’t want to touch it.’ You either block legitimate customers and lose revenue or leave the doors open to modern attacks. It’s a doomsday choice no one should have to make.”

A New Brain for an Old Problem

Huskeys is not proposing another rip-and-replace solution. Instead, it has developed what it calls the industry’s first Edge Security Management (ESM) platform, designed to act as an intelligent brain that sits on top of a company's existing security infrastructure. With a simple plug-and-play deployment, the technology integrates across multi-cloud and multi-WAF environments, unifying the flow of data from the Content Delivery Network (CDN), WAF, infrastructure, and the application itself into a single, cohesive layer.

At the core of the platform is a patent-pending agentic AI engine. Unlike traditional machine learning models that rely on historical data and pattern recognition, agentic AI is designed for autonomous action. It perceives its environment, makes decisions, and takes action to achieve specific goals. In this context, Huskeys’ AI continuously assesses traffic behavior, business logic, and risk. It abstracts provider-specific syntax from different WAF vendors, enriches the data with the organization’s unique environmental context, and then adapts and orchestrates security rules and policies in real-time.

The goal is to optimize for both security and business outcomes simultaneously, finally aligning protection with the speed of modern application development. This approach aims to transform the static, complex, and often-feared WAF into a dynamic, automated, and intelligent asset.

Forged in Frustration: The Unit 8200 Connection

The company’s mission is rooted in the deep technical expertise of its founders, Itai Gafni and Roy Weisfeld (CTO), both alumni of the Israeli military’s elite intelligence group, Unit 8200. Gafni previously led AI innovation within the unit, while Weisfeld was a security researcher focused on web hacking in complex hybrid environments.

Their collaboration began on a project that exposed the very vulnerability they now aim to fix. “We met while working on a mutual project that used AI to enhance web hacking to bypass the most common WAF vendors, and it was shocking how easily we were able to bypass every existing solution,” said Roy Weisfeld. “Their effectiveness was essentially zero.”

This shared frustration over the gap between the sophistication of modern attacks and the static nature of web defenses became the catalyst for Huskeys. They saw an industry stuck with fragmented, disconnected tools that failed to account for real business impact, and they set out to build the unifying intelligence layer they believed was missing.

From Business Blocker to Revenue Generator

A primary symptom of the WAF problem is the high rate of false positives, where security rules incorrectly identify legitimate user activity as malicious. For an e-commerce site, this could mean blocking a customer from completing a purchase. For a SaaS platform, it could mean preventing a user from accessing a critical feature. The financial consequences can be staggering.

Huskeys positions its platform as a direct solution to this revenue drain. According to the company, one customer case study demonstrated how its AI engine identified overly aggressive, vendor-managed WAF rules that were blocking legitimate customers from completing purchases. By recommending precise rule changes, Huskeys claims it eliminated the false positives and restored millions in revenue within hours.

“Huskeys was built to integrate within minutes and deliver value within hours, not weeks,” Gafni emphasized. “Now teams can stop guessing and turn their WAF from a business blocker into a revenue generator.”

This value proposition has already attracted high-profile customers, with the platform reportedly deployed at global brands including TikTok, Merlin Entertainments, and the AI community platform Hugging Face. While public case studies are not yet available, a common practice for sensitive security deployments, the early adoption by such significant players signals strong market interest.

A Coalition of Believers: Inside the Strategic Seed Round

The $8 million seed round is notable not just for its size but for the strategic diversity of its participants. The funding provides more than just capital; it offers a powerful vote of confidence from across the technology, business, and even sports worlds.

The round includes venture capital firms 10D, SV Angel, toDay Ventures, CCL, and Alumni Ventures. However, the most significant validation may come from the inclusion of prominent cybersecurity angels and, critically, more than 30 Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) from some of the world's leading companies. Their investment signifies that the very people who experience the “doomsday choice” daily believe Huskeys has a credible solution.

Further broadening the investor base is a group of individual angel athletes, including soccer star Mario Götze, NFL player Kelvin Beachum, and NFL Hall of Famer Larry Fitzgerald. The round also saw participation from The Players Fund, which is backed by international sports stars. This modern approach to fundraising leverages the global brands and extensive networks of these athletes to drive brand recognition and open new doors, demonstrating a savvy go-to-market strategy that extends beyond the traditional tech ecosystem.

This unique coalition of venture capitalists, cybersecurity veterans, and global influencers underscores the broad appeal of Huskeys' mission: to finally fix a foundational piece of the internet's security infrastructure that has been broken for far too long.