Sebastian Kurz has gone from running Austria to building an AI cybersecurity business, and this week DREAM made the jump investors care about most: money plus valuation. On Thursday, DREAM announced a new $260 million funding round, bringing its valuation to $3 billion. The Series C is a milestone for a company founded three and a half years ago, and it signals that “AI security” is no longer just a slide-deck category. It is becoming a funded, deployable capability with a clear target buyer.

DREAM’s pitch is specific and, in a world where breaches move faster than patch cycles, potentially urgent. The company says its AI-powered cybersecurity platform has attracted customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, and it is designed to detect and stop state-sponsored cyberattacks before they compromise government systems or critical infrastructure. The people running this are not beginners in the threat world. Kurz, now a cofounder alongside Shalev Hulio, frames the macro shift plainly: “The next cyber war will be fought by AI against AI.” Hulio, who oversees technology at DREAM, points to origins of prevented attacks, saying many came from China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

To understand why this $260 million raise is a big deal beyond the headline valuation, you have to look at who is writing the checks and what they are betting on. The round was led by Bicycle Capital and Group 11, with participation from Bain Capital, Tru Arrow Partners, along with investor James Rothschild, Norway’s Antler, and several other global investors. That lineup matters because cybersecurity spending is often cautious and procurement-heavy. When capital of this kind concentrates behind a relatively new platform, it implies the product is already fitting into real security workflows, not just promising improvements.

DREAM’s stated competitive edge is also unusually about control, not just performance. Hulio says the platform enables governments to become more independent in cybersecurity, with a specific policy-style promise: “Countries shouldn't have to depend on either the US or China.” In the company’s description, that independence has a technical enforcement mechanism. DREAM builds solutions that governments own, operate, and control themselves. Its model and data handling are positioned as privacy-and-sovereignty features, with the claim that “their data never has to be uploaded to the cloud, and it's never shared with anyone.” For buyers, this can change the internal conversation from “Can we try this tool?” to “Can we deploy this without creating a new dependency or compliance risk?”

That sovereignty theme is also why DREAM’s founder story is more than branding. Hulio brings a cybersecurity pedigree from the Israeli technology company NSO Group, which was behind the controversial Pegasus spyware, and he says much of the threat landscape is evolving in recognizable ways: Russia relies on large-scale phishing campaigns, while China is building AI-powered attack capabilities. In other words, DREAM is claiming not just that AI helps defense, but that the categories of attack are shifting in ways that traditional approaches may struggle to keep up with.

The funding arrives alongside traction metrics that help explain why DREAM can plausibly scale now. The company has generated roughly $300 million in revenue to date, Kurz says. He also says DREAM became profitable this year, with a workforce of around 350 employees. Profit and revenue at this stage do not guarantee long-term dominance, but they reduce one of the biggest risks for early-stage cybersecurity startups: running out of time before enterprises and governments are ready to adopt. They also suggest that DREAM is not merely building a prototype for a future buyer class, but already operating inside procurement timelines.

There is also a geography-and-regulation angle that matters for how AI security products spread. DREAM is preparing to grow operations in Abu Dhabi and has decided to establish a research and development center in Germany. Hulio says the unresolved question is where, and he emphasizes that “for us, a direct flight to Tel Aviv is important.” That detail may sound operational, but it points to how engineering, security expertise, and deployment realities travel together. For European decision-makers, Germany-based R&D plus a Tel Aviv engineering connection is a signal that the company is trying to straddle Western European business culture and Israeli tech execution without creating friction for customers.

Finally, the “former politician to tech founder” arc has strategic implications for boards and executive teams watching leadership transitions. The article notes that Kurz previously worked out of Austria's chancellery on Vienna's Ballhausplatz, then now welcomes visitors to DREAM’s sleek glass office tower in Tel Aviv. It also highlights a working style contrast Hulio describes: Kurz can fit 20 meetings into an hour and is disciplined to the point that, in Hulio’s words, being one minute late means “you're already late.” Whether you interpret that as culture fit or founder momentum, it is part of why DREAM appears to be moving fast: recap capital, grow coverage, and keep building while the market attention is hot.

The second-order stake for investors, government CISOs, and enterprise security leaders is this: DREAM’s model is trying to turn AI cybersecurity into something governments can own, operate, and control, explicitly avoiding cloud dependency and data sharing. If that approach continues to attract customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, it could accelerate a shift in how security vendors design deployments, how regulators evaluate sovereignty and data handling, and how future procurements weigh “defense capability” against “trust architecture.” At $3 billion valuation and backed by a $260 million Series C, DREAM is no longer an interesting founder story. It is a funded bet that the next cyber arms race will be fought with AI that lives where the buyer decides it should live.