AIR Raises $50M to Secure AI Agent Add-Ons and Skills
Cybersecurity startup AIR has emerged from stealth with $50 million in funding to help enterprises monitor and secure the third-party skills and plug-ins used by autonomous AI agents.
Israeli cybersecurity startup AIR has launched out of stealth after securing $50 million across two closely spaced seed rounds. Founded by Unit 8200 veterans Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, the company aims to protect enterprises from the security risks associated with autonomous AI agents. The startup's platform discovers active agents within a corporate network, monitors the tools and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers they use, and blocks unauthorized actions. The funding consists of a $10 million first round led by Sequoia and a $40 million second round led by Greenoaks, with participation from angel investors including Zach Frankel, Yinon Costica, Ofir Ehrlich, Anne Neuberger, Omer Adam, Varun Anand, Swish, and Netz.
AIR addresses a growing vulnerability in the AI ecosystem: the unverified software supply chain of plug-ins, skills, and add-ons that agents use to interact with the web and internal databases. To counter this, AIR maintains a whitelist of vetted tools, continuously re-evaluating them for malicious changes or compromised developer accounts. The startup currently filters out about 27% of the skills and add-ons it analyzes online. According to Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky, the challenge "is not a scanning problem, it is a continuous re-verification problem" that requires robust infrastructure to track real-time changes across an entire enterprise.
The startup already has more than 20 customers, with roughly a quarter of them being large enterprises, particularly in highly regulated sectors like finance and pharmaceuticals. With 40 employees, AIR plans to use the new capital to hire researchers and expand its sales efforts in the United States and Europe. However, the company faces stiff competition in the rapidly growing AI security market. Rivals like Zenity, which raised a $125 million Series C in August, and Noma Security, which secured a $100 million Series B last year, are also targeting this space alongside Astrix Security and Operant AI.
This is our own summary of reporting by TechCrunch AI
