Blackstone leads $27M Huskeys round as AI traffic strains edge security

Blackstone Innovations Investments led a $27 million Series A in Huskeys, valuing the year-old AI-native security startup above $100 million as automated agents now drive most web traffic and strain traditional edge defenses.

"AI is changing the game," Itai Gafni, CEO and co-founder of Huskeys, said. "The bulk of online traffic now is driven by AI agents, as opposed to people, making it harder to spot bad traffic."

Huskeys' Network Edge Security Management platform sits atop existing CDNs, web application firewalls, cloud-native firewalls and load balancers, orchestrating policy across vendors through a patented Unified Data Model. The company says it analyzes more than one trillion web requests daily for customers including TikTok, LEGOLAND, Ro, Blackstone and Hugging Face. Revenue has roughly quadrupled quarter-on-quarter since early 2026, with customer growth quintupling, Gafni said.

The round comes as IBM data shows AI-driven malicious breaches rose about 56 percent in the year through February, with AI attacks adding roughly $1 million to average breach costs. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has projected AI bot traffic could exceed human-generated web traffic by 2027, while security researchers warn that AI tools like Anthropic's Mythos are finding software bugs at unprecedented rates — a phenomenon dubbed "Bugmageddon."

The edge has become a coordination problem

Modern applications route traffic through CDNs, WAFs, cloud-native firewalls, load balancers and virtual private clouds before requests reach the application itself. Each product works independently, but coordinating policies across them becomes harder as organizations operate across multiple cloud providers and security vendors.

The traditional human-versus-bot model that underpins most bot protection is breaking down. An automated request could be a malicious scraper or attacker, but it could equally be an AI shopping agent, enterprise workflow or automated system acting legitimately on a customer's behalf. Security teams now face a classification problem: determining not just whether traffic is automated, but whether it is legitimate, malicious or simply unpredictable.

Huskeys' answer is what it calls Network Edge Security Management, or NESM — an orchestration layer that translates policies and configurations from different vendors into a common model. Rather than replacing existing WAFs or CDNs, the platform continuously assesses the edge environment, recommends policy changes and orchestrates those changes across security products. Deployments can begin through read-only access, letting the platform map configurations before organizations enable automated policy changes.

The company has demonstrated the approach in practice. In response to a critical React Server Components remote-code-execution vulnerability, Huskeys published cross-platform mitigations spanning Cloudflare, AWS, Akamai and Azure, including protections for environments where vendor-native coverage was unavailable. Its Virtual Patching capability deploys network-level rules that block exploitation attempts while developers work on permanent software fixes — a capability that becomes more critical as vulnerability exploitation moves toward machine speed.

Blackstone's bet on a new security category

For Blackstone, the investment reflects a conviction that single-layer defenses no longer suffice. "The way organizations secure internet-facing applications is fundamentally changing," said Adam Fletcher, chief information security officer at Blackstone. "AI-driven traffic and increasingly fragmented edge environments require a new approach to security management."

Fletcher, who led the investment with David Kim, a vice president at Blackstone Innovations Investments, cited Blackstone's own investor portal as an example of the tension: the firm needs to keep its website accessible to legitimate users while protecting confidential data. Overly restrictive firewalls block real customers and cost money; permissive ones expose organizations to reputational and financial risk.

The round also included Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures, Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel, alongside individual investors including WAF and CAPTCHA inventor Eran Reshef and executives from Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Check Point, AWS, Google, Microsoft and Intel. Zscaler's participation links the private deal to a publicly traded cybersecurity company whose products sit in the same edge security stack Huskeys aims to orchestrate.

Blackstone portfolio company Merlin Entertainments, the operator of Madame Tussauds and LEGOLAND theme parks, introduced Blackstone to Huskeys. In a case study, Huskeys said it identified managed WAF rules that were incorrectly blocking legitimate users arriving through marketing campaigns at Merlin properties. After adjusting those policies, Merlin reported an 80 percent reduction in false positives across booking and checkout flows.

Huskeys plans to build a sales and marketing presence in the U.S. and has roughly doubled headcount in the last two months to nearly 40 employees, targeting about 50 by year-end. The company generates annual contract revenue in the six-figure range, according to a company representative.

The broader question is whether NESM becomes a standalone category or gets absorbed by the very vendors Huskeys orchestrates. Cloudflare, Akamai and Zscaler all have the distribution and engineering resources to build similar management layers, though none has yet shipped a product that coordinates across competitors' infrastructure. For now, Huskeys' early customer traction — including TikTok and Hugging Face alongside Blackstone itself — gives the startup a proof point that enterprises want a neutral layer above their existing security stack.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.