For security teams, the network edge is increasingly becoming a place where too many technologies, too much traffic and too many competing risks meet.
Internet-facing applications may be protected by a combination of cloud services, CDNs, web application firewalls and network infrastructure. Each can play an important role, but together they can create fragmented environments that are difficult to understand and manage consistently.
That challenge is the focus of Huskeys, which has raised a $27 million Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments. The funding was first reported by the Wall Street Journal and brings the company’s total funding to $35 million, including its earlier $8 million seed round.
The Series A also included Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures, Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel, as well as individual investors including WAF and CAPTCHA inventor Eran Reshef and executives from organizations including Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, Google, Microsoft and Intel.
The Edge Is Where Security and Business Collide
The problem with managing the network edge is that security decisions can have immediate business consequences.
Block legitimate traffic, and organizations can lose customers and revenue. Allow malicious traffic through, and applications may be exposed to attacks. Security teams are expected to make those decisions while managing increasingly complex and distributed infrastructure.
The arrival of AI is making that job more difficult. Autonomous agents can create legitimate automated interactions with applications, while attackers are increasingly using AI-driven capabilities to identify and exploit vulnerabilities.
Security teams must therefore distinguish between different forms of automated activity while also adapting policies as applications, threats and infrastructure change.
Huskeys is building its technology around the idea that the existing tools used to protect the edge were not designed to operate as a unified system.
A Different Way to Manage Existing Technology
The company calls its approach Network Edge Security Management, or NESM. The platform is designed to sit on top of existing infrastructure rather than replace it, connecting technologies across an organization’s network edge.
That includes CDNs, WAFs, cloud-native security solutions and network components such as load balancers, VPCs and security groups.
Huskeys’ patented Unified Data Model creates a common layer of understanding across those different environments. The company says this enables security insights, policies and actions to move across providers and technologies while supporting multi-cloud and multi-vendor environments.
The platform also provides continuous posture assessment, dynamic policy generation and orchestration. Its Virtual Patching capability allows organizations to mitigate vulnerabilities at the network edge while a permanent fix is developed, tested and deployed in application code.
“We founded Huskeys because security teams are being asked to protect increasingly complex edge environments with legacy tools that were never designed to work together or to address the challenges of the new AI era,” said Itai Gafni, CEO and Co-Founder of Huskeys. “Every business today runs through its network edge – that’s where your customers, your revenue, and your threats all meet, yet for most organizations, that edge works against them instead of for them. As AI transforms both legitimate traffic and cyberattacks, organizations need an intelligence layer that continuously understands what’s happening across the edge and adapts security in real time. Our goal is to make the network finally work for the business, not against it. That’s the category we’re building.”
A $27M Vote of Confidence
Huskeys says its customer base includes TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Blackstone and Hugging Face. The company is already analyzing more than a trillion web requests and thousands of network configurations every day across organizations worldwide.
Blackstone’s investment places the company behind an emerging approach to a familiar cybersecurity problem: how to maintain visibility and control when the underlying environment is becoming increasingly distributed.
“The way organizations secure internet-facing applications is fundamentally changing. AI-driven traffic and increasingly fragmented edge environments require a new approach to security management,” said Adam Fletcher, Chief Information Security Officer at Blackstone. “Huskeys has built a platform designed to operate at enterprise scale while advancing a new category for the modern network edge. We believe the company is well positioned to redefine how organizations manage edge security, and we’re excited to support Huskeys as they continue to develop their product in this important category.”
The network edge is unlikely to become simpler. As organizations continue to add technologies and AI changes the traffic flowing through their applications, the challenge will increasingly be managing the environment as a whole. Huskeys is using its new funding to build the layer it believes organizations will need to do exactly that.
