As bad actors weaponize AI to exploit software vulnerabilities at unprecedented speed, companies are increasingly recognizing the need to bolster their cybersecurity defenses.

Fortunately, those very AI tools are also helping businesses fight back.

The need for such capabilities has helped Exaforce, an AI startup that detects and thwarts attacks in real time, secure a $125 million Series B. The round valued the three-year-old startup at $725 million, and saw participation from HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, and Seligman Ventures.

The massive funding round comes just a year after Exaforce raised a $75 million Series A, bringing its total funding to $200 million. The influx of capital underscores both the high cost of building and selling an AI-enabled security operations center (SOC), and the massive market opportunity investors see in the space.

Exaforce says it uses AI agents, called “Exabots,” with deep data analysis to automate security operations, taking the heavy lifting off of human analysts.

For the startup’s co-founder and CEO Ankur Singla, the mission is straightforward: Apply AI to catch and stop threats as they happen. “It’s a very simple mandate, but it’s very complex to execute,” he said.

The real challenge for security teams is that the vast majority of threat alerts are false positives. “A security operations person gets hundreds of alerts. How do you know what is a real, high-priority alert?” said Umesh Padval, a managing partner at Seligman Ventures, comparing the work of security teams to looking for a needle in a haystack.

Exaforce claims its AI platform can reduce manual, time-consuming tasks by as much as 90%.

Recognizing the rise in cyberattacks, the startup recently introduced “vibe hunting,” a feature that lets security teams query its AI platform with natural language to investigate potential attacks based on simple hunches. “With vibe hunting, you can ask a very simple hypothesis like, ‘Did we get any new attacks from Iran?’” Singla said.

Exaforce officially brought its product to market in the fourth quarter of last year, following two years of testing with design partners. The startup has since added 20 customers, including notable names like Replit and Guardant Health. Due to the rise in cyberattacks, Singla told TechCrunch that Exaforce expects to reach 40 to 50 customers by the year’s end.

High-profile attacks have “supercharged our ability to get to customers, because the customers now don’t ask, ‘why do I need this?’” Singla said. The question he is hearing more often now is: “How do I operationalize it?”

Exaforce isn’t alone in applying AI to security operations. The company faces competition from startups such as 7ai, Dropzone AI and Prophet Security, as well as industry giants Palo Alto Networks and CrowdStrike.