Artificial intelligence (AI) security startup AIR publicly debuted Tuesday (Sept. 1) with $50 million in seed financing to help businesses monitor and secure the software supply chain developing around autonomous AI agents, according to a report by TechCrunch.
The company was founded by CEO Yair Saban and Chief Technology Officer Niv Hoffman, both veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence corps. The report noted that AIR secured the funding across two seed rounds closed within weeks of each other. Venture firm Sequoia Capital led an initial $10 million round, followed by a $40 million investment led by Greenoaks Capital, with participation from enterprise security founders and angel investors.
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According to the report, corporate AI agents routinely deploy third-party plug-ins and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to connect with internet resources, while utilizing digital “skills” to autonomously execute tasks across internal databases. As companies grant agents broader operational access, these unvetted software components present supply-chain vulnerabilities where malicious actors can poison the data or code that an agent consumes. As reported, AIR’s platform seeks to address these security risks by discovering active agents across a network, flagging unauthorized employee tools, continuously checking external components for malicious alterations and blocking non-compliant software. The startup reported in the article that its system currently filters out approximately 27% of the agent add-ons and skills evaluated online.
Customer adoption has been strongest in heavily regulated sectors, particularly financial services and pharmaceuticals. The report stated that AIR currently serves more than 20 corporate clients, with large enterprise customers representing about a quarter of that total.
Emphasizing the current lack of governance across AI agent extensions, Saban drew a parallel to historical enterprise software challenges.
“In the early 2000s, whenever you installed a driver, the driver didn’t need to be signed. Today, every time you install a driver, you see a signature saying who signed it, because the driver is actually loading code into the kernel,” he told TechCrunch. “You don’t have that with skills or plug-ins or MCPs, and it’s a shame, because it’s the same mechanism, it’s the same lesson, but we haven’t learned it.”
The funding comes as financial institutions and enterprise risk managers confront a growing governance gap surrounding autonomous systems. As PYMNTS reported in March, traditional cybersecurity infrastructure was engineered for static applications and firewalls rather than autonomous AI agents that interpret natural language prompts, cross software boundaries and retrieve corporate data independently. Because financial services firms increasingly rely on agents to process transactions, cross-reference customer records and draft compliance filings, unmonitored agent activity creates severe operational and regulatory risks. These threats highlight the need for dedicated platforms that enforce audit trails and strict access controls before rogue code reaches core banking networks.
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