Team8 Raises $365 Million to Back AI-Native Startups Across Cyber, Infrastructure, Fintech and Health

--- headline: "Team8 Raises $365 Million to Back AI-Native Startups Across Cyber, Infrastructure, Fintech and Health" slug: "team8-365m-ai-native-fund" category: "business" story_number: "08" date: "2026-08-12" ---

# Team8 Raises $365 Million to Back AI-Native Startups Across Cyber, Infrastructure, Fintech and Health

The Israeli venture group Team8 has closed on $365 million in fresh capital, a bet that the next generation of enterprise winners will not be the companies training AI models, but the ones building the security, infrastructure and plumbing that make those models safe to run inside a bank, a hospital or a Fortune 500. The raise, announced August 12, lands as corporations rush AI agents into production faster than their own defenses can keep up.

The new money is split in two: $265 million for Team8 Capital's third core fund and more than $100 million earmarked for follow-on investments in the firm's highest-conviction portfolio companies. The close pushes Team8's assets under management to nearly $2 billion across eight funds since 2014, a milestone that cements the group as one of the more distinctive players to emerge from Israel's cybersecurity and intelligence diaspora.

A foundry, not just a checkbook

Team8 is not a conventional venture firm. Founded in 2014 by Nadav Zafrir, a former commander of the Israel Defense Forces' elite Unit 8200 signals-intelligence unit, along with 8200 veterans Liran Grinberg and Israel Grimberg, the group runs a "venture creation" or foundry model. Instead of waiting for founders to pitch, Team8 frequently incubates companies from scratch, pairing entrepreneurs with a company-building operation of more than 90 people and a network of hundreds of enterprise executives who serve as early design partners and prospective customers.

That machinery is the pitch. "We built this firm on the belief that broad and deep context, not capital, is the scarcest resource at the earliest stage of a company's life," said Liran Grinberg, co-founder and managing partner at Team8. In practice, that means portfolio companies get access to Team8's CISO and CIO networks for market validation, recruiting muscle, and go-to-market help long before they have a product to sell.

Team8 Capital, the group's investment arm, is led by managing partners Sarit Firon and Grinberg, alongside partners Ori Barzilay and Hadar Siterman Norris. The fund plans to lead and co-lead seed and Series A rounds, writing checks of roughly $5 million to $15 million into AI-native companies across four verticals: cybersecurity, software infrastructure, fintech and digital health.

The thesis: value moves above the model

The strategic wager running through the raise is that competitive advantage is migrating away from the foundation models themselves. As access to frontier intelligence from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic becomes commoditized, Team8 argues, differentiation will come from everything built around those models: proprietary data, workflow integration, identity, distribution and security.

"AI is fundamentally rewriting the economics of company building. Developing breakthrough technology has never been easier; building a company that endures has never been harder," said Sarit Firon, managing partner at Team8. "As AI capabilities continue to evolve at a pace none of us has seen before, competitive advantage won't come from the model underneath a product — it will come from solving fundamental enterprise problems that stay relevant across technology cycles."

Notably, Team8 says it will keep investing exclusively in software rather than hardware, even as much of the industry's capital stampedes toward chips, data centers and physical AI infrastructure. Firon and Grinberg frame that as a conviction call: the infrastructure buildout does not make software less important, it changes how software gets built and used.

A security gap becomes an investment thesis

The fund's emphasis on the AI security and infrastructure layer is grounded in Team8's own data. A survey of 111 security leaders conducted at the firm's recent CISO Village Summit found that 97% of organizations have already begun adopting AI agents and 80% are running them in production, yet respondents rated their confidence in their ability to secure AI at just 2.32 out of 5.

That widening chasm between adoption and control is, in Team8's telling, the single most urgent operational problem facing enterprise technology leaders as autonomous agents gain access to corporate data, credentials, applications and workflows. The new fund will concentrate on AI-native companies working on infrastructure, orchestration, identity, data and security that let enterprises adopt AI faster without losing visibility or governance.

Momentum and marquee backers

Team8 is raising into strength. The new fund has already deployed into nine companies over the past year while fundraising was underway, and it booked its first exit before final close: Palo Alto Networks' reported roughly $400 million acquisition of portfolio company Koi Security, whose software helps contain risks from AI agents, earlier this year.

The firm's track record gives the story ballast. Earlier Team8 Capital funds backed Classiq, a quantum-computing software company that has raised more than $200 million; FundGuard, which builds infrastructure for the financial sector and closed a $100 million round; and Port, an agentic-AI developer platform valued at $800 million. Across the portfolio, companies have raised roughly $1 billion from outside investors, including about $762 million in the past year alone, and Team8-built or backed companies have been acquired by Cisco, PayPal and Palo Alto Networks.

The limited partner base signals renewed institutional appetite for Israeli tech after a turbulent stretch. Indian IT giant Infosys invested for the first time, joining existing strategic backers that have historically included Walmart and Cisco. "After the complex period at the height of the war in Israel, we have recently seen a return of investors to Israeli funds," Firon told Calcalist, adding that anxiety about AI uncertainty is now "stronger than anything else" in drawing capital toward funds that specialize in the space.

What to watch

The open question is whether the foundry model scales in an era when, as Firon put it, technology is "easy and cheap to develop." If underlying intelligence is a commodity and speed is everything, Team8 is betting that its context, distribution and enterprise relationships are the moat — and that it can manufacture durable companies faster than well-funded solo founders armed with the same models. Watch the pace of new incubations from Fund III, whether the AI-security thesis produces a second Koi-scale exit, and whether more global strategics like Infosys follow the money into Israel. The AI boom, Team8 is wagering, will not stop at the model.