Kiteworks, a Silicon Valley company that sells software for sharing sensitive data securely, acquired Bonfy.AI, an Israeli startup whose platform classifies sensitive information and applies security policies to it in real time. Kiteworks announced the deal on September 8, 2026.
Terms were not disclosed. Calcalist's English-language site CTech estimated the price at tens of millions of dollars.
Bonfy's technology will be built into the Kiteworks platform. In the meantime Kiteworks will keep selling Bonfy.AI to customers as a separate product, and it said Bonfy's team would speed up development of its Data Control Plane.
What Bonfy built
Bonfy.AI was founded in early 2024 and came out of stealth in June 2025. Its software inspects data as it is exchanged through email, file sharing, SaaS applications, data repositories, AI assistants and autonomous agents, and decides whether the exchange should go ahead before it completes.
Traditional data loss prevention tools mostly look for patterns such as card or ID numbers. Bonfy instead looks at the context around an exchange: who is sending, who is receiving, the relationship between the parties, the channel and the business purpose. It builds knowledge graphs of an organisation's structure and relationships from connections to CRM, identity management and HR systems.
The platform works with enterprise AI deployments including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT, as well as custom agent workflows. CTech reported that it first targeted regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, insurance, law and media.
“We built Bonfy.AI around a single idea: risk is created when data moves, not when it sits, and controlling it means reading the full context of an exchange at runtime, before it completes. Kiteworks gives that technology a control plane and a reach we could not have built on our own. I’m excited to see it governing data for both people and AI agents at global scale.”
Why Kiteworks is buying
Kiteworks argues that companies have spent years cataloguing where sensitive data is stored, but that risk arises when data moves: in an email about to be sent, a file about to be attached or a response an AI agent is about to generate. Bonfy moves classification and enforcement to that moment of exchange.
The combined product is meant to apply one policy model to people, machines and AI agents, so an agent fetching and sending data is governed by the same rules as an employee sending an attachment. Kiteworks also said every classification and enforcement decision would be recorded as audit evidence for regulations such as CMMC 2.0, HIPAA and GDPR.
Kiteworks said context-aware analysis would cut false alerts, a long-standing problem for prevention tools, which it said see roughly half of their alerts turn out to be benign. Chief strategy officer Tim Freestone said that being able to decide, at the instant data leaves, whether it should leave, and to prove that decision to a regulator later, was a gap the company was closing.
The founders and the funding
Bonfy was founded by chief executive Gidi Cohen and chief technology officer Danny Kibel. Cohen previously founded and ran Skybox Security, whose technology was used by more than 500 Global 2000 companies and which was sold to private equity for $375 million in 2018. Kibel was chief executive of identity management company Idaptive and later led global research and development at CyberArk after it bought Idaptive.
When it emerged from stealth, Bonfy announced a $9.5 million seed round led by TLV Partners, with participation from Saban Ventures, according to FinTech Global; CTech named Haim Saban's Saban Capital Group as the other investor. The companies did not say how many people Bonfy employs.
Cohen said Kiteworks would give Bonfy's technology a control plane and a reach that the startup could not have built on its own.
The buyer
Kiteworks says its platform protects more than 100 million end users at thousands of enterprises and government agencies. Its software tracks and secures sensitive data moving into, within and out of organisations to manage risk and meet compliance rules.
Chief business officer Amit Toren said the company had grown through in-house development and disciplined acquisitions, with eight deals in under five years.
