There has been a surprise exit by early stage Israeli company Apex Security, which was only founded two years ago and has raised $7 million from Sequoia, Index and OpenAI founder Sam Altman. The AI cybersecurity company, which was founded by CEO Matan Derman and CPO Tomer Avni, has been acquired by US cybersecurity company Tenable for about $100 million, sources tell “Globes” – a handsome return for investors on a company that might have had the potential to grow much larger.
Based in the Sarona Azrieli tower in Tel Aviv, Apex Security is part of a new generation of cybersecurity, which specializes in modular security, AI and preventing manipulation of models through faulty training. Since language models broke into public consciousness and frequent use in 2022, hackers have learned to exploit AI models for their own purposes through what is known as a “jail break” – convincing the chatbot that the user is the company’s CFO, for example, and making it divulge sensitive data from the company’s servers; others feed the model while training it with malicious information or links to malicious websites.
In a profile article about Apex published in Globes last year, the entrepreneurs talked about the expectation of “becoming a data security giant in the field of AI” and spoke of the inspiration they received from Wiz. Today, it turns out that the dream was more short-term, although the return on investment was quite high even for Altman himself. As far as is known, this is the only cybersecurity company in the field of AI that Altman has invested in as he continues his private investment career as an angel investor in parallel with his tenure as CEO of OpenAI – apparently without any connection between the two.
Meeting with Altman
Derman has previously recounted about how he and Avni went to the office of Sam Altman. “We sought a connection to him, and we got it,” says Derman. “We assumed that the AI market would be hot and we wanted the best coaches on our bench. When we met him, the market was talking about responsibility in the field of AI and safety, and the big AI companies needed big cybersecurity companies to secure the use of the field.” Altman does not sit on the company’s board of directors, but serves as an angel investor with whom they consult from time to time.
The company knows how to deal with most closed models: Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and most of OpenAI’s models, and has also begun preparing to work with open models such as Meta’s Llama, as well as managing processes for complying with regulatory rules and company policies for each model that is connected and each use that is made of it. Later, they even believe that they will be able to address the problem of hallucinations and neutralize incorrect and biased information.
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Derman served in the IDF Intelligence Division for 18 years, and commanded one of the prestigious secret sections responsible. Many of his subordinates and those who served alongside him have long since been released, founded companies and become multi-millionaires.
No response to this report has yet been forthcoming.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on May 29, 2025.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2025.
