Dream raises USD $260 million Series C to build sovereign AI for governments, with Antler joining as investor
San Francisco, June 18, 2026: Dream, the AI-native cybersecurity company for governments and critical infrastructure, has raised USD $260 million in a Series C round led by Bicycle Capital, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, BRV and Tru Arrow Partners, and Antler.
Dream was founded by Shalev Hulio, Gil Dolev and Sebastian Kurz, the former Chancellor of Austria. The company protects sovereign customers across Europe, the Middle East and Asia and has signed nearly USD $300 million in total contract value from national governments in just over three years, according to the company. Dream says it has had zero customer churn to date.
Dream's platform runs on proprietary small language models trained on security data and deployed fully on-premise, including in air-gapped environments. The models map national networks and identify vulnerabilities in minutes rather than months, and have outperformed leading frontier models on cyber-specific evaluations. The platform simulates how a nation-state attacker would breach an environment and closes those paths before they are exploited, combining counter-threat intelligence, posture management, and detection and response in one system.
The new capital will fund expansion into new markets beyond Europe, the Middle East and Asia, strategic acquisitions, and Dream's move from cyber defense into a full sovereign AI stack covering infrastructure, domain-specific models, data ingestion, reasoning, agents and applications.
"Building sovereign cyber defense for governments forced us to solve sovereign AI under the most demanding conditions," said Shalev Hulio, Co-Founder and CEO of Dream. "Cyber defense was the proof point. Sovereign AI is the larger opportunity. Our ambition is simple: give every nation the ability to own and control its AI."
"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," said Chris Walsh, Partner at Antler. "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."
Antler joins existing board members Enrique Salem of Bicycle Capital and Michael Eisenberg of Aleph.
- ENDS -
About
About Dream
Dream is an AI-native cybersecurity company building sovereign cyber defense and AI infrastructure for governments and critical infrastructure organizations worldwide.
About Antler
Antler is the world’s most active early-stage investor, backing exceptional people at the very start of their journey — and supporting them from inception to scale. Across more than 25 cities worldwide—including New York, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Bangalore, Singapore, Seoul, and Sydney—the firm helps founders remove the barriers to building by connecting them with world-class peers, validating business models, and providing initial capital. To date, Antler has backed more than 2,000 startups globally, including Airalo, Lovable, Peec.AI, Reebelo, Wrtn, and Benjamin.
For founders who go on to build breakout companies, Antler Elevate—the $285M emerging growth fund—invests beyond the early stages, managed through offices in London, Singapore, and New York.
Contact
Rike Döpp Bergérus
VP, Global Communications
rike at antler.co
https://wa.me/0046706313538