Meet The $580 Million Startup Making AI Models To Fight Artificial Hackers

Depthfirst founders (from left to right): Qasim Mithani, Daniele Perito and Andrea Michi.

Depthfirst

Andrea Michi spent nearly seven years at Google’s Deepmind developing artificial intelligence models that improved energy performance across windfarms and data centers. He realized that the most efficient way to build AI focused on solving large-scale problems isn’t to start with LLMs, and then adjust them to the task: it’s to build models from the ground up with a specific purpose in mind.

In 2024, Michi quit Deepmind and cofounded Depthfirst to apply that thinking to cybersecurity, making AI models that autonomously find vulnerabilities and suggest fixes. The company is developing what it calls “General Security Intelligence,” a play on general artificial intelligence, which refers to AI that’s just as capable at general tasks as humans. His hope is that Depthfirst will find and fix vulnerabilities in any kind of software before a malicious, superintelligent AI model can exploit them.

“We want to make sure these systems that are complex and fragile can sustain a world where AI hacking capabilities are superhuman and that means always staying one step ahead of the attackers,” Michi, who is Depthfirst’s CTO, tells Forbes.

“The agent tries to figure out the most exploitable vulnerabilities.”

Depthfirst CEO and cofounder Qasim Mithani

Lofty aims, but investors are bought in. On Tuesday, the two-year-old company announced an $80 million raise at a $580 million valuation, just two months after a $40 million series A. CEO and cofounder Qasim Mithani, former head of infrastructure security at the $134 billion-valued data analytics company Databricks, tells Forbes the company is ramping up fast. Its revenue has grown 300% over the last two quarters and has more than 20 customers, from multinationals to AI startups like the $6.6 billion vibe coding platform Lovable. Alongside Michi and Mithani, the third cofounder is Daniele Perito, an ex-cybersecurity…

Source