Ex Israeli Army Cyber Boss Raises $75 Million for Cloud Security

Defence affairs - marissa newman reports for Bloomberg

Sweet Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup founded by the Israeli army’s former chief information security officer, has raised $75 million in new funding.

Sweet Security was founded by Dror Kashti, a two-star general who oversaw the Israel Defense Forces’ migration to the cloud under Project Nimbus, the cloud-computing contract with Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS that drew protests within the companies.

Kashti said the military’s transition to the public cloud, which he supported, made him aware of the shortcomings of existing cloud security platforms. These had frequent false alarms and didn’t offer enough visibility into threats, he said. “This is why I left the army and founded Sweet,” he said.

The company has a proprietary large-language model that establishes a baseline, then distinguishes between normal and abnormal behavior in cloud infrastructure, according to Kashti. It plans to expand its platform to secure AI models and agents to prevent, for example, a rogue AI agent from compromising a company’s data.

The funding round was led by Evolution Equity Partners, with participation from Munich Re Ventures and others. The investment will go toward expanding its marketing and sales teams in the next year to expand into the US market. Sweet Security has raised $120 million since its founding. It declined to disclose its valuation.

Cybersecurity remains one of the most resilient industries in Israel. Cyber startups raised $800 million in the third quarter of 2025, accounting for 38% of all tech funding, according to Startup Nation Central, a nonprofit organization that tracks the local tech industry. Most of Israel’s cybersecurity expertise has roots in the IDF’s technological and intelligence units.