Airis Labs emerges from stealth with $60M and a video-intelligence pitch to defense agencies
May 27, 2026 – 2:31 pm
The Tel Aviv-founded defense-AI firm has closed a $31M Series B led by PSG Equity, bringing total funding to $60M as it scales US operations from Washington DC.
Airis Labs, the defense-AI startup that has spent the past two and a half years operating in stealth, emerged publicly on Tuesday with $60m in total funding, including a $31m Series B led by US growth-equity firm PSG Equity. The round brings in TLV Partners, Stepstone Group, Redseed Ventures, and angel investors including Eyal Waldman, the former Mellanox co-founder and CEO whose company was sold to Nvidia for roughly $7bn in 2020.
The company’s pitch is narrower than the broad “AI for defense” banner under which a generation of startups has been raising capital. Airis builds what it calls a video-first intelligence platform: software that ingests fragmented visual data, security camera footage, drone feeds, body-camera recordings, smartphone uploads, social-media imagery, and the long tail of what it labels “user-generated field intelligence”, and produces machine-readable structured output that analysts and AI agents can query, reason over, and act on.
The category, on the company’s framing, is distinct from traditional video analytics, open-source intelligence platforms, and generic data-fusion tools. The customer base, on its own count, is government organizations worldwide, with named selection into the Oracle Defense Ecosystem.
The underlying problem Airis is addressing is real and well-documented in defense-AI circles. Government investigators and military intelligence teams now drown in unstructured visual data. A typical urban-incident investigation can produce thousands of hours of mixed-source footage; a typical drone-mission archive can fill terabytes of unindexed video. Human analysts cannot review that volume fast enough to catch operationally relevant signals before they age out.
Building software that turns the raw visual flood into searchable, structured intelligence is the category Airis has bet the company on. The competitive set is meaningful and worth naming:
- Palantir’s Project Maven remains the headline US defense-AI deployment for video analysis.
- Helsing sits at the European end of the same arc with a broader battlefield-AI scope.
- Anduril, Scale AI’s defense unit, and a clutch of newer Israeli startups including BlueGreen Vision and ION-X compete on overlapping ground.
Airis’s differentiated position, on its own framing, is that its platform was built in real operational environments from inception rather than productised out of a research lab, with the implication that the user-experience and workflow integration are tighter than peers’ demonstrations.
The corporate structure is worth pausing on. Airis was founded in 2023 in Tel Aviv by Noam Friedman (CEO), Rotem Abeles (CPO) and Amos Lahav (CBO), with a team drawing on alumni from Palantir, Meta, the Israeli Unit 8200 intelligence community, and the broader Isra…