Dream, a company building artificial intelligence and cyber-defense systems for governments and critical infrastructure, has raised $260 million in new funding. This pushes its valuation to $3 billion just three years after founding.

The round was co-led by Bicycle Capital and Group 11, with participation from Antler, Bain Capital Ventures, Tru Arrow Partners, and other investors. The company noted the financing follows nearly $300 million in total contract value since commercial operations began in late 2024.

Dream positions its technology as sovereign AI. Its platforms are designed to run entirely within government-controlled environments, enabling national authorities to secure and use their data without relying on foreign providers.

Sebastian Kurz, Dream's president and co-founder, said governments are shifting from asking whether to use AI to determining how to maintain control over it. He described sovereign AI as a foundation for national resilience and competitiveness.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post from Tel Aviv, Kurz explained that he and Hulio founded Dream with the idea that AI would transform the world and reshape how cyber attacks function.

As the United States and China lead the AI sovereignty race, he noted that other countries need this technology to avoid dependence on external powers.

According to Kurz, Europe lags in the competition, which is why the European-Israeli company can make a significant contribution.

Nations will become supernations if they adopt AI, Kurz said. In the past, nuclear power defined a super nation, but the future will be more digital, with cyber, quantum, and AI as the key elements.

Shalev Hulio, Dream's co-founder and CEO, said the rise of AI marks a shift comparable to earlier eras of strategic infrastructure investment that drove economic growth and national security. He explained that the company's mission is to help governments protect and operationalize their information as AI becomes central to national security and public services.

Land created empires. Industry created nations. Artificial intelligence will create the next super nations, he said. Every nation has data. Few can protect it. Fewer can use it. Sovereign AI is the key. We built Dream to help governments secure their information, transform it into knowledge, and convert that knowledge into national capability. The future of a nation should never depend on technology it does not control.

The former chancellor of Austria said the disruptive power of AI will enable greater efficiency across all sectors. Dream offers AI in a box: systems built for nations and critical infrastructure.

Dream currently offers three main platforms. Sphere provides unified national-level cyber defense capabilities, combining cyber intelligence, exposure management, attack-path analysis, digital-twin modeling, and AI-driven detection and response.

Hero functions as an autonomous AI security researcher that identifies vulnerabilities and continuously tests defenses. Atlas is the company's sovereign AI system, designed to connect fragmented government data and generate structured insights within secure, government-controlled environments.

The future is all about data, Kurz told the Post. You just need the capabilities to make something out of it.

Growing footprint

Investors said the company is emerging at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and government technology.

Governments around the world are increasingly seeking secure and sovereign ways to deploy artificial intelligence, said Shu Nyatta, co-founder and managing partner of Bicycle Capital. Dream has built a unique platform at the intersection of AI, cybersecurity, and government technology. The company is defining one of the most important technology categories of the coming decade.

Founded in 2023 by Hulio, Kurz, and Gil Dolev, Dream employs about 350 people across Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, and Vienna. The company said the new capital will accelerate deployment of its sovereign AI and national cyber defense platforms across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. With the latest round, Dream has raised $412 million to date.

In February, the company opened a sovereign AI data center near Modiin. The facility, part of a tens-of-millions-of-dollars investment, is designed to serve national agencies and critical infrastructure operators that require full control over data, model training, and deployment environments.

The data center includes a GPU cluster built on NVIDIA B200 systems, enabling Dream to train proprietary language models and domain-specific AI systems. The company develops its own models rather than relying solely on public foundation models, targeting sectors such as cybersecurity, healthcare, transportation, and finance, as well as decision-support systems for government agencies.

With the data center in Modiin, Dream aims to strengthen its role in Israel's growing AI ecosystem, which includes defense-oriented AI initiatives, secure cloud environments, and national cyber capabilities. The company said the facility will support long-term investment in AI systems that must operate under the highest levels of security, reliability, and accountability.