Expat Australian AI startup Nullify has raised US$12.5 million (A$17.8m) in a second Seed round.
The now San Francisco-based AI software vulnerabilities platform previously landed a US$3.41m (A$5.2m) Seed round in March 2024 and a A$1.1m in pre-Seed funding in mid 2023, led by OIF Ventures, taking the total raised to more than A$24m.
Founded in Sydney in 2022 by Tim Thacker and Shantanu Kulkarni (Tony Mao left the business in late 2024), Nullify relocated to California following the 2024 round, and maintains a Sydney office.
The latest Seed round was led by Florida cybersecurity-focused VC SYN Ventures, supported by existing investor Black Nova. SYN operating partner, Glenn Chisholm, a cofounder of Obsidian and CISO at Telstra, has joined Nullify’s board.
Nullify’s AI agents replace the manual work of finding, validating and fixing software vulnerabilities. It ingests code, cloud configurations and business context to autonomously identify real risks, generate exploits and ship fixes that are ready to merge into software code.
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The startup says its AI agents have saved customers more than 48,00 hours of manual work, has auto-resolved more than 450 vulnerabilities and has a close to 90% average merge-ready rate for vulnerability fix pull requests.
The new funds will scale Nullify’s go-to-market operations, targeting mid-sized enterprises and high-growth SaaS companies globally, expand the engineering and research teams, and its global ambitions.
AI battle
Kulkarni, the CEO, said companies using legacy dashboards, scanners, and ticket routing against the greater speed and sophistication of AI-enabled attackers are losing the fight losing game.
“Whether organisations have a mature program or zero product security headcount, Nullify AI employees replace tool sprawl and the human hours it consumes, so defenders can finally outpace the offense,” he said.
“We now have the capital and the operating partnership to scale this model to the teams most constrained by talent shortages and legacy tool complexity.”
SYN’s Glenn Chisholm said the security labor gap is the defining challenge for defenders today.
“Nullify’s first-of-its-kind AI workforce doesn’t just summarise alerts. It autonomously makes decisions and takes action, delivering outcomes that once required entire teams,” he said.
Nullify’s investors also include Two Sigma, Root Ventures and OIF.