CTech Data
$13.2 billion in nine months: Inside Israel's AI-fueled funding surge
Three quarters of funding data suggest 2026 will comfortably exceed 2025's total of $15.6 billion.
Nine months into 2026, Israeli startups have raised a combined $13.2 billion across 192 disclosed funding rounds according to CTech Data, a pace that, if it holds for the rest of the year, would make 2026 one of the strongest years in Israeli tech history. It has not, however, yet caught up to 2025. Israeli startups raised $15.6 billion across all of 2025, itself a notable achievement, given that the country spent much of that year at war, including a summer shutdown during the Twelve-Day War with Iran. Nine months of 2026 figures sit at roughly 85% of that full-year total, with a quarter still to go.
The arithmetic matters less than the trajectory it implies. At the pace Israeli startups have raised money so far this year, averaging close to $1.5 billion a month, a final quarter anywhere near that run rate would push full-year 2026 past $17 billion, comfortably ahead of 2025, but still well short of the all-time high of $27 billion, set during the speculative peak of 2021. Whether that happens will depend heavily on how many large, late-stage rounds land in the final three months, since in this market a handful of mega-deals routinely account for a third or more of any given month's total.
If there is a single explanation for where this money is going, it is artificial intelligence, and more specifically, the unusually narrow slice of AI focused on securing it. Among the 192 rounds counted here, a striking number describe the same basic premise: that the rise of autonomous AI agents, software capable of taking actions inside corporate systems without constant human oversight, has created an entirely new category of risk that didn't meaningfully exist two years ago, and an entirely new market to address it.
Companies like Oasis Security, Zenity, Neo, Mate Security, Hush Security, Onyx Security and A Security have each raised rounds in the tens to low hundreds of millions this year, all pitching some version of the same idea: that enterprises deploying AI agents by the thousands need tools to monitor, govern or intercept them before something goes wrong. This mirrors a broader pattern CTech's own data confirms for the preceding year, in 2025, cybersecurity and generative AI together accounted for 40% of all Israeli funding rounds and roughly 70% of all capital raised, with AI-focused funding alone nearly doubling, from $4.9 billion to $7.9 billion.
A small number of outsized rounds have done an enormous amount of the work. Among the largest disclosed in this nine-month window: Wonderful, an enterprise AI agent platform, raised $550 million in a round that valued it at $5 billion. Island, the enterprise browser company pivoting toward securing AI agents, raised $400 million at a $6.4 billion valuation in late September alone. Covenant, a secretive defense startup that spent two years in near-total stealth developing a long-range weapons system, emerged with $250 million at a valuation north of $1 billion. Upwind, a cloud security company, raised $300 million just months after a prior $250 million round, more than doubling its valuation to $3.8 billion in under half a year, one of several companies in this list to raise twice within the same nine-month period, a sign of how quickly capital is now chasing perceived winners. Cyera, a data-security company expanding into AI-agent governance, raised money on at least three separate occasions this year alone, pushing its valuation to more than $12 billion and its 2026 funding total past $1.4 billion by September. And two of the year's largest single checks went to infrastructure rather than software as such: Vast Data raised $1 billion as its valuation soared to $30 billion, and AppsFlyer raised over $1 billion from Google, Meta, Unity and Moloco at a $2.7 billion valuation.
The $13.2 billion figure above is a bottom-up tally built from individually reported deals, it excludes investments where no dollar figure was disclosed (several strategic investments from firms like Cisco, ServiceNow and American Express went unquantified this year) and does not claim to capture every private financing that occurred without public announcement. It is, in other words, a floor rather than a precise final number, which makes the fact that it already sits so close to all of 2025's total more notable, not less.
First published: 16:25, 01.10.26
