Big raise for AI security startup
Depthfirst raised $120 million to build 'general security intelligence' aimed at defending against malicious AI—evidence that investors are funneling big capital into AI‑security and observability plays. The round signals a growing market for ML teams focused on robustness, attack detection, and securing model supply chains. (forbes.com)
Andrea Michi, Qasim Mithani and Daniele Perito are listed as depthfirst co‑founders, with Michi a former DeepMind engineer, Mithani previously head of infrastructure security at Databricks, and Perito a former cybersecurity chief at Block. (forbes.com) The company’s Series B was led by Meritech Capital with participation from Forerunner Ventures and The House Fund and lists prior backers including Accel, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, Alt Capital and Mantis VC. (businesswire.com) Depthfirst emerged from stealth in January 2026 with a $40 million Series A led by Accel and has announced follow‑on funding within 90 days of that round. (techcrunch.com) depthfirst introduced an in‑house model, dfs‑mini1, trained via reinforcement learning on security‑specific environments, initially focused on smart‑contract vulnerability detection and evaluated on OpenAI’s EVMBench. (businesswire.com) Public reporting places a post‑round valuation at $580 million, cites revenue growth of roughly 300% across the previous two quarters, and notes the company serves more than 20 customers, including the coding platform Lovable. (forbes.com) Company statements and coverage say the new capital will be used to expand applied research, engineering, product and go‑to‑market teams, signaling hiring for specialized security‑focused ML and software roles. (businesswire.com)
