Israeli cybersecurity company Dream Security, which was founded by former spyware company NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio, former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz and Gil Dolev, has raised $45 million in a secondary offering, in which senior and veteran employees will sell shares. The financing was completed at a company valuation of $1.3 billion, up from $1.1 billion in the company’s most recent financing round in February 2025.
A “secondary” financing round is a process of purchasing shares directly from veteran shareholders by new and previous investors, without the money reaching the company’s coffers. In this case, the new round is led by a fund called 7GC, founded by Stefan Pols, head of the German office of the private equity fund KKR, and his American partner Jack Linney. It also includes existing investors Tru Arrow Partners, TAU Capital, and the company’s seed investor, Dovi Frances’ Group 11. These four funds are investing $23 million, and the remaining amount will be invested by smaller investors.
Secondary rounds have made a comeback to the tech scene in the past year after a two-year absence, following the bursting of the Covid technology bubble. The years 2020-2021 were characterized by secondary rounds, sometimes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, for entrepreneurs who had founded unicorns only two or three years previously. In the past two months alone, several high-growth tech companies have completed such rounds, including: Aramis with a secondary round of about $100 million; Exodigo with $10-15 million; and tens of millions of dollars raised by Shlomo Kramer’s Cato Networks.
In February 2025, Dream Security became a unicorn when it raised $100 million at a company valuation of $1.1 billion, in a round led by Bain Capital. As part of the financing round Bain partner and former Symantec CEO and Mandiant chairman Enrique Salem and former Teva CEO Shlomo Yanai joined Dream’s board of directors.
At the beginning of the year, the company reported a backlog of orders of $130 million, and today the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) is estimated at $100-150 millio.. Dream was founded two years ago by Shalev Hulio, former CEO and founder of NSO, who left the cyberattack but continues to work with heads of state and heads of cybersecurity systems as CEO of Dream, which aims to protect government companies, national cyber systems, and infrastructure companies.
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on August 31, 2025.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2025.
