The growing number of powerful, widely available AI models has ushered in a dangerous era for cybersecurity. Nefarious actors now have the ability to carry out complex attacks at unprecedented scale, creating a need for more tools to defend against them.
That’s where Corma comes in, a startup emerging from stealth today with $60 million in seed funding to build AI models for defensive cybersecurity, led by Sequoia Capital, along with Khosla Ventures and Coatue. The announcement did not include Corma’s total valuation.
Founded in 2025, Corma is based in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. It deployed its first model six weeks ago to a variety of Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 organizations across sectors, including healthcare, financial services, energy, critical infrastructure, and retail.
The name “Corma” comes from The Lord of the Rings, CEO Alon Pluda tells Fortune. The books are centered around the quest to destroy an all-powerful ring, or “corma” in Elvish. Pluda says his company’s product is like that ring, “but this time for the defenders.”
Most popular AI models today from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are trained to carry out cybersecurity attacks, Pluda said, not to defend against them. For example, these models excel at writing and refining code, identifying bugs, and multi-step reasoning. “Those same capabilities map directly to offensive security,” Pluda said.
In contrast, Corma trains its AI models to specialize in qualities related to defensive cybersecurity, most of which “doesn’t have anything to do with coding,” Pluda said. Instead, it’s more about “looking at logs, audits, [and] finding the needle in a haystack.” Also key: maintaining a consistent approach across thousands of actions.
“Corma has trained its model for the complexity of real-world attacks and is building the intelligence layer defense actually needs,” said Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia. “Agentic AI gives attackers a structural speed advantage, but Alon’s hacking talent paired with Corma’s frontier AI research helps companies combat these threats at scale.”
Corma’s model has reduced threat response times by 94% in the organizations that have adopted it, the company says. As we’ve seen in recent months with OpenAI’s models attacking Hugging Face, AI cyberattacks are happening at superhuman speed, making it difficult for human-driven processes to stop them. Corma is helping organizations fight AI with AI.
“As cyberattacks become more autonomous and scalable, the stakes move beyond data and finances to critical infrastructure, healthcare systems, and essential services where failures can have real-world consequences,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. “That is why we need entirely new approaches to cyber defense and teams like Corma pursuing one of the hardest problems in cybersecurity.”
“Corma has trained its model for the complexity of real-world attacks and is building the intelligence layer defense actually needs,” said Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia. “Agentic AI gives attackers a structural speed advantage, but Alon’s hacking talent paired with Corma’s frontier AI research helps companies combat these threats at scale.”
Corma will use the $60 million in funding to further scale its AI models by expanding the data and training that power them. The company will also grow its team, with a focus on hiring top talent across defensive security, AI, and research to continue advancing their model.
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