Gambit Cyber raises $3.4m to expand AI‑native platform for continuous threat exposure management
Key Takeaways
- Gambit Cyber closed a $3.4m seed round led by Expeditions, with Bitdefender Voyager Ventures participating.
- Funding will accelerate development of KnightGuard, an AI-native platform built for continuous threat exposure management (CTEM).
- The company is expanding across Europe, the UAE, India and the Asia‑Pacific region as demand for risk‑centric cybersecurity grows.
Gambit Cyber has secured a $3.4m seed round to scale its AI-driven platform for continuous threat exposure management, the kind of tooling many CISOs say they need but often struggle to operationalise. The raise was led by Expeditions, a security-focused early-stage investor, with backing from Bitdefender Voyager Ventures, the investment arm of Bitdefender. It’s a small detail, but the combination of a specialist security fund and a global cybersecurity vendor is a strong hint about how Gambit wants to position itself commercially.
The company’s core product, KnightGuard, is designed to help organisations continuously identify, validate and reduce cyber risks rather than perform risk reviews only at scheduled intervals. And that “continuous” piece is where the industry has been stuck—most security teams know CTEM is valuable but lack the capacity to execute it at scale. Gambit argues that an AI-native architecture, using a coordinated set of specialised agents, is what finally makes that model workable.
KnightGuard’s mesh of AI agents integrates with existing security capabilities to prioritise threats, validate exposures and mobilise remediation efforts. That may sound like standard platform language, but the emphasis on pre-emptive action is unusually explicit. The company frames the platform as a way to bring predictable, ongoing clarity into environments where attack surfaces are expanding faster than teams can manually keep up.
Early deployments are already underway across India, the UAE and several European markets. That geographic mix isn’t accidental. Those regions have seen accelerated investment in both offensive and defensive cyber technologies, and they’ve also experienced some of the steeper skills shortages in security engineering, as noted by several recent surveys from firms like ENISA. While Gambit isn’t positioning itself as a workforce substitute, the timing echoes broader market pressures.
The company says KnightGuard is gaining traction with early enterprise users and managed security service providers (MSSPs) in financial services, telecoms and critical infrastructure. Each of those sectors faces messy operational realities—layered tooling, regulatory oversight, long remediation cycles—which makes continuous validation difficult. One question some readers may be wondering: does “AI-native” end up meaning “another layer to integrate”? The company doesn’t frame it that way, but it’s something buyers will inevitably press on during pilots.
Gambit Cyber plans to use the new capital to accelerate product engineering and expand commercially across Europe, the UAE and the Asia‑Pacific region. The funding will also support development of partnerships with MSSPs, telecom operators and cloud platforms. And yet, partnerships of that scale often take longer than expected to operationalise, especially when a start-up’s product touches high-risk workflows like vulnerability validation and remediation orchestration.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Gambit operates with teams and channel partners in the UK, the UAE, Australia and India. It’s a distributed footprint that maps neatly to where demand for CTEM appears to be rising fastest, at least according to industry trendlines highlighted by organisations like the NCSC. Still, spreading teams across that many regions at seed stage is ambitious, and hints at a go-to-market strategy that leans heavily on partners rather than direct sales.
Co-founders Anuj and Manuj Kumar said the investment validates their mission to reinvent how organisations understand and respond to cyber risks. They emphasised that KnightGuard was built from day one to be AI-native, risk-centric and pre-emptive—phrasing that reflects a deliberate move away from traditional point-in-time assessment models. Their positioning is clear: they’re not trying to replace existing security tools, but to give teams a real-time layer that reduces the lag between detection and verification.
From the investor side, Expeditions’ founding partner Mikolaj Firlej said the fund is partnering with Anuj and Manuj because they see KnightGuard as foundational for organisations adopting CTEM. It’s notable that Expeditions frames the platform not just as AI‑enabled but as “designed for scale, automation and threat‑informed decision-making.” Those are attributes enterprise buyers increasingly evaluate in combination rather than in isolation.
Bitdefender Voyager Ventures echoed that sentiment, saying it invests with long-term commitment in founders and technologies that align with its vision for the future of cybersecurity. Their statement underscores the strategic fit: Gambit’s focus on security, data, automation and AI lands squarely in Bitdefender’s wheelhouse. Because Bitdefender brings global operational expertise, the partnership may also help Gambit avoid some of the integration pitfalls that trip up younger CTEM vendors.
What stands out across all of this is the company’s insistence that KnightGuard isn’t bolted-on AI—it’s architected around AI interactions from the outset. Whether that distinction matters in day-to-day operations will depend on how well the agents perform under real-load conditions and how seamlessly they correlate exposures with business risk. Even so, the early interest from enterprise buyers and MSSPs suggests Gambit has found a receptive audience.
The next phase is execution. Scaling AI agents, expanding across multiple regions and building partnerships with telecoms and MSSPs is a wide-ranging agenda for a seed-stage company. But if KnightGuard delivers on its promise of constant validation and prioritisation, it could slot neatly into the workflows of teams trying to stay ahead of increasingly automated threat actors. For now, Gambit Cyber is betting that continuous exposure management isn’t just a practice but a product category—and that the market is ready for it.
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