· Venture Capital Tracker Editorial · investment-strategies
Guardio’s $40M at $1.1B: Consumer Cyber With $150M ARR
Guardio raised $40M at a $1.1B valuation — Wiz co-founder Assaf Rappaport joined returning Israeli growth investors — after hitting $150M ARR and 1M paying customers.
Guardio raised $40 million on September 3, 2026, at a $1.1 billion valuation, taking total funding to $167 million (PR Newswire). Assaf Rappaport (Wiz co-founder/CEO) joined returning investors ION Crossover Partners, Union Tech Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, Cerca Partners, and Emerge Ventures.
consumer security finally has a SaaS-looking P&L — $150M ARR, 1M paying customers, four years of >100% growth — while AI made scams cheap enough that antivirus-on-the-laptop is the wrong product.
Key facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Company | Guardio (Tel Aviv) |
| Round | $40M at $1.1B |
| ARR | $150M (company) |
| Customers | 1M+ paying |
| Total raised | $167M |
| Founded | 2018 |
| Founders | Amos Peled (CEO), Michael Vainshtein (CTO), Daniel Sirota |
Who uses the product — and for what job
Users: individuals (and households) paying for protection of digital accounts and daily online activity — email, messages, calls, browsing.
Job: stop AI-scaled social-engineering scams before the victim clicks, not detect malware after a laptop is “clean.” Guardio’s pitch is person-centric monitoring across channels, including multi-device attack paths (call → malware on PC).
CEO Amos Peled’s framing: scammers hack people, not computers — and AI collapsed the cost of personalized phishing and deepfake voice.
Why now
- FBI and industry crime stats (cited in company materials) show AI-related complaint and loss spikes — consumer budgets follow fear with a subscription.
- Enterprise cyber is crowded; consumer cyber with real ARR is rare enough to clear a unicorn mark on a modest primary check.
- Rappaport’s check is a category endorsement from the last generation’s cloud-security winner.
Why these investors — portfolio fit
ION and peers are doubling down on a crossover growth story with proven distribution. Rappaport adds operator signal without needing a traditional lead check size.
Strategic rationale: raise a clean growth extension at scale metrics rather than a mega-round that would reprice before distribution catches the next 10× of users.
ION/Union/Vintage are not in our fund directory.
| Dimension | Fit |
|---|---|
| Stage | Growth / late |
| Thesis | Person-centric consumer cyber in the AI scam era |
| Multiple | ~$7× ARR on $150M / $1.1B — disciplined vs. many AI apps |
| Risk | CAC durability, platform policy risk (browser/OS), brand trust |
Competitive map
| Player | Lane |
|---|---|
| Classic antivirus (Norton, McAfee) | Device-centric legacy |
| Big Tech account protection | Free, partial, platform-tied |
| Other consumer scam blockers | Feature overlap, less ARR proof |
Takeaway
Guardio’s story is the inverse of vaporware AI security: unit economics first. The unresolved question is whether person-centric protection can reach the “tens of millions” of users Peled targets without CAC exploding once the easy million is converted.
Sources
- PR Newswire: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/consumer-cybersecurity-pioneer-guardio-reaches-1-1-billion-valuation-302868923.html
- CTech: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hy5rf0lofg
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Editorial note: AI tools assisted with research, structure, or drafting. Venture Capital Tracker retains human editorial responsibility for factual accuracy, relevance, and source quality before publication.
