Jonathan Jacobi, who began his cybersecurity career as a researcher at Check Point Software Technologies at the age of 16, has raised $15 million in what ranks among the largest seed funding rounds in Israel’s technology sector this year. The round was led by prominent venture capital firms and will fund the development of an AI-native security operations platform designed to fundamentally rethink how enterprise threat detection and response is structured. As appetite for AI-focused investment continues to climb across global markets, Jacobi’s raise reflects deep investor conviction in the next generation of autonomous security infrastructure.

The startup, which Jacobi co-founded after accumulating years of hands-on experience across some of the most technically demanding environments in the cybersecurity industry, is building what its founders describe as an agentic AI system — one capable of reasoning through complex threat scenarios and taking autonomous action without requiring constant human intervention. The company’s thesis is that legacy security operations centers, reliant on manual triage and siloed tooling, are structurally unable to keep pace with the volume and sophistication of modern attacks, according to Calcalist Tech.

A Career That Started Before Most Begin University

Jacobi’s professional trajectory is unusual even by the standards of Israel’s famously young and technically precocious technology industry. He joined Check Point — one of the world’s most recognized network security companies and a foundational pillar of Israel’s cybersecurity ecosystem — while still in secondary school, contributing to vulnerability research and threat intelligence work typically reserved for seasoned professionals. That early exposure placed him inside critical infrastructure and enterprise-scale security challenges at an age when most peers were completing coursework.

Following his time at Check Point, Jacobi accumulated additional experience across defense-adjacent and enterprise security contexts before co-founding the new venture. Observers familiar with the Israeli startup ecosystem note that backgrounds combining elite military-adjacent training, early-stage industry exposure, and deep technical research frequently produce founders capable of identifying gaps in existing security architectures that incumbent vendors have been slow to address. Israel remains one of the world’s most dense concentrations of cybersecurity expertise, with the sector regularly producing companies that scale to global relevance, a dynamic also visible in recent adjacent deals such as the Hailo AI acquisition by Microchip Technology.

Seed Round Scale Signals Shifting Investor Calculus on Autonomous Security

The $15 million seed figure is significant in context. While mega-rounds at the growth stage have become routine across the broader technology landscape, seed rounds of this magnitude in Israel — particularly for a company that has not yet released a generally available commercial product — remain uncommon and typically require a compelling technical differentiation story alongside a founding team with demonstrable domain credibility. Investors appear to have found both in Jacobi’s case.

The funding will be directed primarily toward engineering headcount, platform development, and early enterprise customer acquisition. The agentic AI security category Jacobi is targeting is increasingly crowded, with several well-capitalized startups and large incumbent vendors all repositioning their products around AI-assisted or AI-automated threat response. The competitive pressure is real, but investors backing Jacobi appear to be wagering that a purpose-built, AI-native architecture will outperform products where AI capabilities have been layered onto older underlying systems. The broader market context also favors the bet: enterprise security budgets have expanded consistently over the past three years as attack surfaces widen alongside accelerating cloud adoption and the proliferation of connected infrastructure. Whether Jacobi’s platform can convert technical ambition into durable commercial traction will be the defining question as the company moves from seed capital toward product launch and, eventually, a Series A process.