Dream Triples to $3B, Ex-NSO Founder Pushes Into Latin America

The founder of the company that built Pegasus is now selling governments the counter-play, and Latin America is where the sales pitch is landing. According to The Next Web, Dream, the Israeli AI cybersecurity startup Shalev Hulio co-founded after leaving NSO Group, has tripled its valuation to $3 billion this year, with reported sales that have exceeded $300 million and more than doubled over the past two years. Bicycle Capital and Group 11 lead the investor base.

The context around Hulio matters. NSO Group, the company he previously created, was blacklisted by the US Commerce Department in November 2021. Dream, which he founded in January 2023, is pitching itself as sovereign AI cybersecurity for national governments, with more than 300 employees across Tel Aviv, Vienna and Abu Dhabi, a Munich office planned, and a sovereign data centre built near Modiin, Israel. His co-founders are Sebastian Kurz, the former Austrian chancellor who was convicted in February 2024 of making false statements to a parliamentary inquiry and then acquitted on appeal in May 2025, and Gil Dolev, founder of intelligence-gathering firm Wayout Group.

Why Latin America, why now. The reporting frames the region as the world's fastest-growing market for cyber attacks, with incidents rising roughly 25% annually and a World Bank preparedness score averaging just 10.2 out of 20. Costa Rica's 2022 Conti ransomware siege, in which roughly 30 government institutions were hit and $10 million was demanded, prompted President Rodrigo Chaves to declare a national emergency on 8 May, and it is the kind of event that turns sovereign cyberdefence from a slide deck into a line item. Politically, the piece flags governments aligned with the current US administration: Argentina's Javier Milei, who has pitched his country as an AI hub and pledged to move its embassy to Jerusalem, and Colombia's Abelardo De la Espriella, who won the 21 June presidential runoff with 49.66% and promised to restore Israeli diplomatic relations.

The honest caveat is that a Pegasus founder selling sovereign AI to national governments carries the same dual-use problem the previous chapter did. Software marketed as defensive to states with fragile institutional checks can quietly become offensive, and the reporting does not walk through Dream's product controls, customer vetting, or what the AI cyberdefence stack actually does under the hood. Named signed contracts are also absent, so treat the regional momentum as reported sales talk, not audited revenue.

For practitioners the thing worth watching is less Dream itself and more the pattern it fits: geopolitics is becoming the fastest route to market for AI infrastructure companies, and sovereign cybersecurity is where the export-controlled part of that story lives.