Airis Labs Emerges from Stealth with $60M to Transform Defense AI Video Intelligence

For years, the overarching problem facing defense analysts and national security teams has not been a shortage of data. It has been the precise opposite. Drones patrolling contested airspace, extensive CCTV networks blanketing urban infrastructure, body cameras recording frontline operations, and the relentless flood of user-generated content across social media have fundamentally overwhelmed human cognitive capacity. The challenge that defense agencies face today is translating this fragmented, unstructured visual noise into actionable intelligence rapidly enough to inform life-or-death decisions.

Enter Airis Labs. Stepping out of a purposeful two-year stealth mode, the U.S.-Israeli AI defense technology startup has announced its official launch armed with $60 million in total funding. This public debut—and the massive war chest behind it—signals a definitive shift in the 2026 AI landscape: the next frontier of artificial intelligence isn't unfolding in pristine corporate laboratories, but rather out in the messy, high-stakes operational field.

Company Overview: Mission-Driven Veterans Unlocking Visual Data

Founded in April 2023, just months before the geopolitical landscape shifted dramatically with the October 7 attacks, Airis Labs was built by veterans who intimately understood the pain points of modern intelligence. CEO Noam Friedman, a former senior official in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office; Chief Product Officer Rotem Abeles, previously a strategist at Palantir Technologies; and Chief Business Officer Amos Lahav, who leads the company's U.S. operations, form the core leadership team.

Headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area with a primary R&D center in Tel Aviv, the 50-person company is squarely focused on solving the visual intelligence bottleneck. Airis Labs provides a video-first AI platform capable of ingesting raw, unstructured visual data from practically any authorized source—smartphones, open-source media, digital forensics, security feeds, and drones—and converting it into structured, machine-readable intelligence. By utilizing advanced AI agents that can scale infinitely across multiple missions, the platform frees human analysts from grueling hours of manual video review, allowing them to focus entirely on the strategic judgment calls only humans can make.

Funding Details: A Staggering $60M Arsenal

The emergence of Airis Labs comes with significant financial backing. The company has raised a total of $60 million to date, anchored by a newly announced $31 million Series B round. This latest tranche was led by PSG Equity, a prominent growth-equity firm with a track record of backing over 130 software companies globally.

PSG Equity was joined by existing backers TLV Partners, who led the startup's Seed round in September 2023 and the subsequent $11 million Series A. Other institutional investors include Stepstone Group and Redseed Ventures. Furthermore, the cap table is fortified by a formidable syndicate of strategic angel investors with deep roots in enterprise tech and defense, including Eyal Waldman (founder and former CEO of Mellanox, which sold to Nvidia for $7 billion), Jeff Horing, Yasmin Lukatz, and David Chinn.

Market Analysis: Defining 'User-Generated Field Intelligence'

The defense technology sector is currently experiencing an unprecedented boom. In recent years, venture capital flowing into defense and dual-use startups surged to nearly $50 billion annually, largely driven by the exigencies of modern conflicts in regions like Ukraine and the escalating technological competition among global superpowers. While much of this capital has been poured into autonomous hardware—such as self-flying drones from Anduril or autonomous maritime vessels from Saronic—software platforms designed to process the overwhelming sensory data generated by these systems have historically lagged.

Airis Labs explicitly distances itself from generic data fusion and traditional video analytics, which often fail when lighting changes or environments become cluttered. Instead, they are defining an entirely new category: User-Generated Field Intelligence™ (UGFI). As CEO Noam Friedman articulated, "Government teams do not have a shortage of raw visual data. They have a shortage of machine-readable understanding. The next generation of AI used by government agencies needs to understand the physical world: what happened, where it happened, what changed, what matters, and what requires human judgment."

Globally, sovereign and defense AI capabilities are becoming a primary focus. For instance, international cloud giants like South Korea's Naver Cloud have recently launched dedicated defense AI task forces explicitly modeled on the "Palantir approach" of embedding field engineers with tactical units to deploy sovereign multimodal AI models. In this highly competitive environment, Airis Labs' biggest competitors are rarely other established vendors; instead, they are competing against the fragmented, in-house data science projects built piecemeal by government agencies that rarely scale effectively to meet real-time operational demands.

Strategic Implications: Scaling U.S. Operations and Oracle Integration

Armed with its robust Series B capital, Airis Labs is well-positioned for rapid expansion. The immediate priority is doubling its global headcount by the end of the year, expanding its world-class engineering team in Tel Aviv while significantly scaling its U.S. footprint in Washington, D.C.. This stateside expansion will be crucial for capturing major defense contracts across the Department of Defense (DoD), Homeland Security, and various federal law enforcement agencies.

A key pillar of Airis's go-to-market strategy is its integration into the broader enterprise defense ecosystem. The startup has already been selected to join the Oracle Defense Ecosystem—a high-compliance, national-security innovation partner program. This strategic alliance will ensure that Airis's AI models can be securely deployed in highly classified cloud environments, mitigating the data security concerns that often stymie defense tech adoption.

Investor Perspective: Betting on Battle-Tested Resilience

Why did top-tier investors funnel $60 million into a secretive defense startup? The answer lies in the company's operational maturity. Unlike many AI platforms built using pristine, sanitized data sets in controlled laboratory settings, Airis Labs was forged in real-world environments.

"Airis Labs is the rare company that was born from a deep understanding of the problem space," noted Eyal Waldman, angel investor and board member. The platform was deployed across multiple security agencies within months of its founding, successfully ingesting fragmented video feeds, massive data volumes, and high-stakes outcomes during periods of intense national security crisis. For growth-equity firms like PSG Equity, the investment thesis is simple: Airis provides a commercial off-the-shelf, production-ready system validated by the operators who rely on it daily, completely bypassing the "prototype purgatory" that traps many defense tech hopefuls.

Conclusion: The New Vanguard of Cognitive Defense

The formal launch of Airis Labs represents a critical turning point in how national security apparatuses will handle visual information. As sensors continue to proliferate and generate infinite streams of footage, the tactical advantage will no longer belong to the military that can collect the most data, but rather to the one that can comprehend it the fastest. By transforming unstructured pixels into coherent, searchable intelligence, Airis Labs is doing more than just building better defense software—they are equipping the modern analyst with the clarity required to secure the future.