Dream is pioneering AI-native cybersecurity for governments and critical infrastructure organizations worldwide. Founded by Shalev Hulio, Gil Dolev, and Sebastian Kurz (former Chancellor of Austria), Dream has become the trusted cyber defense partner to sovereign customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with cumulative bookings well into the nine figures and zero churn to date.

For us, this is not a new conviction. We have known the Dream team dating back over two years, when the company was roughly 60 people and its first government contracts were freshly signed. Less than two years later, the team has more than tripled, revenue has compounded several times over, and the product thesis we underwrote then has become the industry consensus.

The Problem

With each computing paradigm shift, specialized security platforms emerge as critical infrastructure. The rise of SaaS and the cloud created leaders like Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, CrowdStrike, and Wiz to protect cloud workloads. The AI era demands something different because AI has not simply created new workloads to protect. It has armed attackers with capabilities that compress attacks from months into minutes.

Nowhere is this gap more dangerous than at the level of nations. Governments and critical infrastructure operators must defend the most complex environments on earth: sprawling hybrid networks, decades of legacy systems, and operational technology that cannot go offline, all against nation-state adversaries using zero-day exploits and AI-powered attack tooling. The status quo of piecing together dozens of enterprise point solutions was never designed for this fight. For countries, sovereign cyber defense is now a head-of-state issue, not just an IT budget line.

Dream’s founders saw this shift early. While much of the market focused on securing AI systems, they recognized a broader challenge emerging for governments: how to safely adopt AI without becoming dependent on infrastructure, models, and platforms they do not control.

As Dream's Co-Founder and CEO Shalev Hulio explains: "Everyone agrees AI is a game changer, and governments need it to serve citizens. What people miss is the cost of relying on someone else’s AI.

"When a government depends on foreign models it doesn’t host, it inherits a dependency. Models can be restricted, throttled, or switched off. A nation’s most sensitive data ends up on infrastructure it doesn’t control. That’s a national security risk whether the use case is intelligence, healthcare, finance, or critical infrastructure.

"Recent conflicts have shown that data centers are now part of the battlefield. And recent restrictions on frontier models have shown how fragile AI dependency can be.

"Governments need AI to drive prosperity and security, but they need to do it sovereignly and securely. They must be able to use their most sensitive data, make critical decisions, and keep operating regardless of external events. Sovereignty is the difference between AI that strengthens a nation and AI that fails when it’s needed most."

The Team

It is hard to imagine a team better matched to this problem than Dream. They combine deep cybersecurity DNA, elite AI research leadership drawn from Israel’s intelligence community, and a sales motion that operates at the level of prime ministers and presidents. They have also recruited one of the strongest technical teams we have seen anywhere, competing successfully for talent against the world’s largest AI labs.

Enter Dream

Dream built the first AI-native cybersecurity platform designed for nation-scale protection. Its proprietary specialized small language models (SLMs), trained on vast security datasets and deployed fully on-premise (including in air-gapped environments), power agentless protection that maps national networks and identifies vulnerabilities in minutes rather than months.

Dream’s models have outperformed leading frontier models on cyber-specific evaluations, built by one of the most talent-dense AI teams we have encountered. The SLM approach has been a theme Antler has followed closely as the structural advantages become increasingly clear. Purpose-built SLMs can achieve superior token efficiency and latency relative to general-purpose frontier models, which is exactly what real-time threat detection requires when running on-premise against nation-scale data volumes.

The methodology remains simple: think like an attacker. Rather than relying on compliance checklists and alert floods, Dream simulates how a nation-state adversary would breach an environment and neutralizes those paths before they are exploited, spanning counter-threat intelligence, posture management, and detection and response in a single platform. This has already been validated by customers reporting risks they had never previously been able to map.

Traction That Validates the Mission

Dream's traction since its Series B tells the story of a category being created in real time. What began as expansion from a handful local sovereign customers has now traversed to disparate use cases across an array of governments, on path to triple its footprint across sovereigns in the last 18 months.

The pace of adoption has challenged many assumptions about how governments buy technology.

As Hulio puts it: "The common assumption is that governments are slow and bureaucratic. What we’ve seen is the opposite. When the issue touches national security, resilience, or sovereignty, decisions happen fast.

"Some of the gaps we discovered surprised us. The speed with which leaders moved to close them surprised us even more.

"The proof is in the numbers: nearly $300M in total contract value in just over three years, from national governments. That only happens when customers understand the problem immediately and recognize the urgency."

Just as important is how Dream wins: head-of-state-level relationships, deployments measured in weeks, and expansion from cybersecurity into broader sovereign AI infrastructure, a second act that meaningfully expands an already substantial market opportunity.

The Next Chapter

This financing accelerates the company’s broader vision for sovereign AI.

Hulio says: "We earned this round by proving the hardest part first.

"Building sovereign cyber defense for governments forced us to solve sovereign AI under the most demanding conditions. The same foundation powers a complete national AI stack: infrastructure, domain-specific models, data ingestion, reasoning, agents, and applications. Cyber defense was the proof point. Sovereign AI is the larger opportunity.

"The capital allows us to scale the platform, expand beyond Europe, the Middle East, and Asia into new markets, and pursue strategic acquisitions that accelerate the stack.

"Our ambition is simple: give every nation the ability to own and control its AI, and help turn nations into super nations."

Why Antler

Antler’s platform spans 28 cities across six continents, with relationships reaching into governments and sovereign institutions in more than 22 countries. As Dream expands into new regions and across Western democracies, we believe this global network is uniquely suited to support the journey.

We’re proud to join existing board members and early supporters Enrique Salem (Bicycle Capital Ventures) and Michael Eisenberg (Aleph).

We look forward to partnering with Shalev, Gil, Sebastian, and the entire Dream team as they establish the standard for how nations defend themselves — and build sovereign AI capabilities — in the AI era.