Huskeys Selected to ICON's SV101

Huskeys joins SV101 Batch 19

Huskeys announced today that it has been selected for Batch 19 of SV101, the immersive program run by ICON. Huskeys is one of 11 companies chosen for the batch, which takes founders to Palo Alto for Oct. 12–22 to meet Silicon Valley investors, technology executives and enterprise leaders.

SV101 is highly competitive: each batch draws about 150 qualifying applications. Since 2016, the program has hosted 241 founders from 177 startups, with 55 exits among its alumni.

A breakout year for Huskeys

ICON's selection builds on a year of fast momentum. Huskeys emerged from stealth in March 2026 with an $8M seed round from toDay Ventures and Merlin Ventures, after graduating from the Intel Ignite accelerator.

In September 2026, Huskeys announced a $27M Series A led by Blackstone Innovations Investments, bringing total funding to $35M. Zscaler Ventures, Okta Ventures, Merlin Ventures, Skinos Ventures, Bright Pixel Capital and SV Angel joined the round, and the Okta and Zscaler investments come with strategic partnerships.

Customers already include TikTok, Hugging Face, Ro, Legoland and Blackstone itself. The platform now analyzes more than one trillion web requests every day.

Rethinking security at the network edge

CEO Itai Gafni and CTO Roy Weisfeld founded Huskeys in 2025 to fix a layer most security teams had learned to live with. Web application firewalls were invented almost 30 years ago, and they still depend on hand-tuned rules that block real customers, miss new attacks and differ from one cloud to the next.

Huskeys takes a different approach. Its NESM platform sits on top of the WAFs and edge tools organizations already run, and adds an agentic AI control plane that manages them as one. The result is consistent protection from the internet edge to the application, fewer false positives that cost revenue, and defenses that adapt to an internet increasingly used by autonomous AI agents.