Lema, a cybersecurity startup founded by former members of Israel’s elite 8200 intelligence unit, is coming out of stealth and announcing fresh funding to fuel its mission to lessen the danger companies face when outside vendors gain access to their systems.
Lema has announced a $24 million Series A funding round led by Team8, a Tel Aviv-based venture capital firm. The valuation was not disclosed.
“I think that third-party risk management was the neglected child of cybersecurity for a very long time,” Eddie Dovzhik, Lema’s co-founder and CEO, told Business Insider. “A problem of this magnitude deserves a solution that actually solves the problem.”
Cybersecurity startups raised nearly $14 billion in 2025, according to Pinpoint Search Group. That was a 47% increase from 2024 and the best year since 2021.
Lema was founded in 2023 by Dovzhik, Omer Yehudai, and Tomer Roizman. They had all left other cybersecurity companies, knowing they wanted to start something new, but not exactly sure what to focus on.
“We started the long and tedious ideation process,” said Dovzhik. “We were looking for a major problem, something that had a huge impact on businesses that the current solutions were not addressing.”
They landed on third-party risk management, an area they thought was traditionally overlooked as companies increasingly depend on thousands of external vendors, from cloud providers to SaaS tools to AI startups, many of which have deep access to sensitive systems and data.
60% of companies now rely on over 1,000 external vendors, according to Gartner. And nearly one-third of recent cyber breaches originated with third parties, according to McKinsey & Company.
“The overall number of third parties has increased dramatically in the past few years,” Dovzhik said. “Everybody is now onboarding all these new AI third parties that behave in a completely different way and pose a completely different type of risk.”
Dovzhik pointed to recent high-profile incidents involving third parties, including last year’s Coinbase breach that impacted nearly 70,000 users and a 2024 CrowdStrike outage that crippled the websites of airlines, hospitals, and banks.
Most companies still rely on spreadsheets and checklists to track third parties, while Lema harnesses AI to help companies better understand where they are most at risk, according to Dovzhik.
“We built an AI agent that thinks like a vulnerability researcher,” Dovzhik said. “Our goal was to come up with a completely different solution that completely changes the way that third-party risk management is being done.”
