V12, an AI-first offensive security startup, has raised a $10 million seed round led by Electric Capital to build autonomous systems that discover and exploit software vulnerabilities at scale. The raise follows V12's AI agent independently earning a $2.5 million bug bounty for finding a critical bug in a major blockchain that put more than $100 million in user funds at risk, according to a company post.

The seed round included participation from well-known crypto security and research figures such as ZachXBT, samczsun, and Walden Yan, alongside other angels. V12 did not disclose a valuation or additional institutional participants. The company is making its product self-serve and is currently offering new users $200 of free usage credits for the next week.

V12 positions itself not as a generic pentesting platform but as an AI-native vulnerability research system focused on white-box code auditing. Its agent, also called V12, has reportedly discovered multiple critical 0days beyond crypto, including Linux local privilege escalations, a QEMU escape, Firefox UXSS, and bidirectional RCEs in Postgres and Redis. The team describes its goal as building a "cyber nuke"—an AI system that can reason over arbitrarily large and complex codebases, invent new bug classes, and produce working exploits.

The founders previously built Zellic, a security firm that has performed more than 1,500 security reviews for over 500 high-target clients including crypto exchanges, L1s, bridges, and wallets, and before that led CTF team perfect blue, which held the top global ranking for three years. V12 says every team member comes from CTFs or vulnerability research, and that when pointed at new software targets—ranging from Dolphin emulator to Signal and even internal NAS devices—its agent continues to surface exploitable bugs.

Strategically, V12 is using crypto as its initial wedge, arguing that onchain projects are among the few verticals forced to prioritize real bug-finding capabilities over compliance and dashboards. The company claims that more than $500 million has been stolen in crypto hacks so far this year and expects that AI-accelerated offensive capabilities will pressure organizations across sectors to treat all code as high-assurance code. V12 believes that traditional bug bounty programs will shrink to niche, high-value acquisition markets as autonomous tools mine out most bugs pre-ship.

The company is openly critical of tightly gated "safety" postures and traditional responsible disclosure models, arguing that embargoes and long patch gaps are untenable when anyone can reconstruct weaponized exploits from public commits. V12 advocates for open disclosure and near-instant patch pipelines, with defenders relying on strong PoC and fix generation capabilities. The new capital is intended to push its research agenda forward while packaging the underlying AI systems into products that embed into existing developer workflows across Slack, GitHub, CLIs, and agent frameworks.

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