Artemis lands $70M to build an AI SOC for machine-speed attacks

Artemis’s $70 million debut is a clean signal about where AI security funding is headed: investors think defenders need an AI-native control layer, not another dashboard full of alerts. In its April 15 exclusive, Fortune reports that the startup emerged from stealth with a Series A led by Felicis, joined by returning investors First Round Capital and Brightmind, plus senior names from across the cybersecurity sector. The piece is here.

The pitch is blunt. Attackers are already using AI to compress timelines that used to give security teams room to think. Artemis says it wants to watch activity across logins, cloud infrastructure, and business apps, learn what is normal inside a specific organization, then connect anomalies into a single story and act before an attack spreads. In Fortune’s telling, that means not just better detection but automatic containment, like locking a compromised account while the incident is still forming.

The funding round is large enough to matter because the company is not just pre-product theater. Fortune reports that Artemis has already closed a few seven-figure deals and expects multi-million-dollar ARR before the end of 2026. Customers already include Mercury, Wix, Lemonade, and Abnormal AI. Founder Shachar Hirshberg, formerly at AWS, and CTO Dan Shiebler, previously head of AI at Abnormal Security, are making an argument that will sound familiar to anyone watching the SOC stack: rule-based tools and fragmented point products were built for slower attackers.

What makes the story more than another funding note is the market positioning. Fortune says one investor sees Artemis as a Splunk successor built for an AI-driven threat environment. Cisco bought Splunk for $28 billion in 2024, but the AI era is putting a higher premium on systems that can reason across security data and take action in real time. That is a big claim, and the field is crowded. Still, a $70 million round this early tells you capital is moving toward platforms that can make fewer, faster decisions while attackers get cheaper, quicker, and harder to read.