Enclave, a startup focused on finding the most dangerous security flaws buried deep within code written by AI, is launching from stealth with $6 million in seed funding at a $33 million valuation, led by 8VC.
The round includes a roster of prominent tech investors and executives, including Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Box CEO Aaron Levie, and Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman.
8VC’s bet on Enclave is shaped in part by its investment in AI coding startup Cognition, the company behind the coding agent Devin, which gave it a front-row seat to how quickly AI-generated software is spreading.
“As a result of that, we’ve seen a lot of AI code generation both in our companies and in large enterprises,” 8VC’s Vivek Gopalan said in an interview. “The last-gen tools are not going to cut it.”
Enclave was founded by CEO Tal Hoffman, CTO Dvir Segev, and CPO Yanir Tsarimi, who previously worked together in application security. Hoffman and Tsarimi met while serving in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, a military intelligence unit widely known as a training ground for cybersecurity and AI talent. The unit has produced a number of prominent tech companies, including cybersecurity firms like Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, CyberArk, and Wiz.
AI has proven very adept at coding
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year that up to 30% of the company’s code is written by AI. Boris Cherny, founder and head of Claude Code, said this year,” pretty much 100% of our code is written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5,” and he had not written a single line of code in two months.
Hoffman, who started coding at 12, estimates that up to 60% of code across all startups is written by AI.
“Within a three-year time horizon, we’re definitely going to cross it 90%,” he said, adding that AI has made coding much faster at Enclave.
“Yesterday we were writing this massive feature that would normally take two weeks,” he said. “AI did it in two hours.”
But all the code generated by AI creates vulnerabilities, according to Hoffman.
“Current solutions are optimizing for quantity, not for quality,” he said.
Enclave is entering a crowded application security market that includes companies like Snyk, Checkmarx, and Semgrep. Hoffman aims to stand out by focusing less on scanning for known issues and more on understanding systems holistically.
“By building that deep knowledge into how your systems behave, it’s much easier to know where to look for vulnerabilities,” he said.
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