Daylight Security Secures $33 Million to Redefine Managed Security with Agentic AI

Daylight, a fast-growing cybersecurity startup based in the US, has raised $33 million in Series A funding, just three months after closing its seed round. The round was led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Maple VC and other top investors, bringing the company’s total funding to $40 million, one of the fastest follow-on rounds in cybersecurity this year.

Daylight’s mission is to reinvent Managed Detection and Response (MDR) with a new approach it calls Managed Agentic Security Services (MASS). Built on an AI-driven core and supported by elite human analysts, the company’s platform promises autonomous, adaptive and context-aware threat detection, investigation and response.

With enterprises across the US and Europe already deploying its system, including The Motley Fool, Cresta and McKinsey Investment Office, Daylight is positioning itself as the next major player in enterprise cyber defense.

Why Does Cyber Defense Need an Upgrade ?

Cybersecurity teams today are stretched thin. Traditional MDR services and Security Operations Centers (SOCs) rely on human analysts to triage thousands of alerts daily, leading to fatigue, delays and missed threats. The problem has only intensified as attack surfaces expand across cloud environments, SaaS platforms and AI-driven attack methods. Manual processes simply cannot keep up with machine-speed threats.

Security leaders are realizing that traditional MDRs are struggling to scale. They detect but don’t resolve; they escalate but don’t act. In the meantime, threats evolve faster than teams can respond. Daylight’s founders saw this gap as both a technological and operational failure, a system that needed to evolve from reactive to proactive, from human-limited to machine-accelerated. Their answer: Agentic AI, a framework where intelligent, autonomous agents collaborate with human experts to investigate and neutralize threats in real time.

What Daylight Security Brings to the Table ?

At its core, Daylight delivers a continuous AI-driven security service that detects, investigates and responds to threats with unprecedented speed and precision. The company’s platform merges three previously separate domains: AI, automation and human expertise into a single, adaptive ecosystem. The system’s “agentic” AI continuously learns from every incident, improving its context awareness and decision-making capabilities.

Unlike traditional systems that merely flag suspicious activity, Daylight’s MASS approach delivers resolutions, not alerts. This means faster incident closure, fewer false positives and minimal human intervention. As the company explains, “With MASS, enterprises can finally scale defense without scaling headcount.” The platform’s key differentiators include:

• Autonomous threat resolution: AI agents triage, investigate & remediate in real time.
• Human-in-the-loop expertise: PhD-level analysts oversee edge cases and continuously train the system.
• Rapid deployment: Customers report setup times under an hour.
• Outcome-focused security: Reduces false positives by up to 90%, ensuring only verified threats reach analysts.

This hybrid model, intelligent machines paired with elite humans has already begun to redefine what managed security can achieve.

$33 million Series A Funding Round and What It Signals for Daylight ?

Daylight’s $33 million Series A is remarkable not just for its size, but for its speed. Secured only months after its $7 million seed round, the raise reflects both the market’s urgency for scalable cyber solutions and investor confidence in Daylight’s model. Craft Ventures, known for backing companies that disrupt legacy industries, led the round. Bain Capital Ventures and Maple VC also participated, reinforcing a trend of top-tier venture firms betting on agentic AI startups in critical infrastructure sectors.

“This round isn’t just validation of our vision,” said Mark Opauszky, CEO of Daylight. “It’s proof of the incredible momentum we’ve built in less than a year.” Opauszky noted that the funds will fuel the company’s next phase of expansion, including scaling its analyst network, strengthening R&D and launching new modules for identity threat response and cloud workload protection. The company’s rapid fundraising cadence signals that the cybersecurity industry is embracing a shift: from manual, alert-driven operations to autonomous, adaptive defense models.

Momentum of Daylight Security That Speaks for Itself

Daylight’s growth story is as impressive as its technology. In less than six months, its customer base has expanded across industries and geographies. Much of this traction has come organically through referrals, with security leaders recommending Daylight to peers after witnessing its impact firsthand.

Deployments are completed in hours, not weeks. False positives are cut by as much as 90%. Investigations that once took days can now conclude in minutes. CISOs and SOC managers echo the same sentiment: “This is what MDR was always supposed to be.” Daylight’s early success underscores an important truth: enterprises are no longer satisfied with incremental improvements to legacy tools. They want systems that think, act and adapt, just as attackers do.

The Market Opportunity: Security for the Agentic Era!

The timing couldn’t be better. The global MDR market, valued at over $5 billion today, is expected to surpass $20 billion by 2030 as enterprises seek managed, outcome-based security solutions.

AI-driven cyber threats are also on the rise. Attackers are now leveraging generative AI to craft phishing campaigns, manipulate data and automate lateral movement within networks. Traditional, human-only defense models are simply outmatched.

Daylight’s MASS architecture offers a new playbook, one that can scale defense at the same speed as modern threats. By fusing agentic AI with human intelligence, the company is not only addressing current needs but also defining what the next generation of cybersecurity infrastructure will look like. 

Strengths and Considerations for Daylight Security!

Daylight’s biggest strength lies in its hybrid foundation: autonomous systems backed by human oversight. This structure allows it to deliver both speed and reliability. Its measurable results like rapid deployments, drastic noise reduction and successful adoption among large enterprises give it credibility in a crowded cybersecurity market.

However, the company’s biggest challenge will be maintaining trust as it continues to automate critical defense functions. Enterprises must feel confident that autonomous systems will make the right calls in high-stakes scenarios. Additionally, as Daylight expands globally, it will face evolving data privacy laws, regional compliance frameworks and the challenge of integrating its platform with legacy enterprise systems. Still, the company’s operational performance and customer enthusiasm suggest that it is well-positioned to navigate those challenges.

What’s Next for Daylight Security ?

Following the Series A, Daylight plans to expand across North America and Europe to strengthen its analyst operations and accelerate the rollout of new AI modules. The company’s upcoming releases including identity threat response and cloud workload protection aim to extend autonomous defense beyond MDR, bringing agentic AI to every layer of enterprise security. Opauszky emphasizes that Daylight’s core mission remains unchanged: “To make world-class cyber defense accessible, adaptive, and truly effective.”

He envisions a future where every organization, regardless of size, can maintain a self-evolving Security Operations Center (SOC) powered by continuous learning and autonomous response. Daylight’s trajectory reflects a fundamental shift in the cybersecurity paradigm. As threats become faster and more complex, defense must become smarter, more adaptive and eventually, self-sustaining. By combining agentic AI systems with elite human expertise, Daylight is pioneering a model that could define how the industry operat