Neo Security bags $100M to build the secure control layer for enterprise AI agents
Agentic software control startup Neo Security Inc. said today it is exiting a years-long spell in “stealth” mode after raising $100 million in funding. The round was led by top tier venture capitalists in Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, and saw participation from Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures. They’re betting that enterprises are going to need purpose-built security to safeguard their increasingly autonomous artificial intelligence systems, and likely need it soon.
Built by former executives and engineers from SentinelOne Inc., Wiz Inc. and Palo Alto Networks Inc., Neo aims to provide security operations teams with the inventory, posture intelligence, attribution and policy controls needed to manage and secure AI agents across entire organizations.
The growing adoption of autonomous AI agents that can conduct work unsupervised on behalf of humans is happening at such rapid speed that traditional security systems cannot keep pace, and it means that the attack surfaces of organizations are changing and expanding faster than ever. Enterprises are adding AI-native tools, but the bigger concern is that even the traditional software they use is integrating agentic capabilities. Because of this, SecOps teams are being asked to secure autonomous software that’s operating inside approved applications, but they lack the necessary control and visibility to do that properly. As per Gartner Inc., just 5% of enterprise applications had agentic features at the end of last year, but more than 40% will by the end of 2026.
Co-founder and Chief Executive Nicholas Warner said existing enterprise security systems were built for a world where software behaved in a predictable way, but that’s no longer true when those tools have agentic features within them. “AI agents and agentic capabilities are being embedded into browsers, developer tools, SaaS platforms and traditional applications, giving software the ability to reason, act, invoke tools, and move through workflows with valid user permissions,” he said.
This means that traditional software is altogether much riskier than before. It’s this challenge that Neo wants to take on, introducing a real-time control layer that can fend off attacks on these evolving tools. It works by giving SecOps teams a way to inventory the full suite of agentic tools running across their enterprise, even as they add new agent functionality. This means they can understand their updated capabilities and the new risks they introduce, assess whether they’re still configured safely, and then change their security policies in the event that a tool is no longer deemed safe.
Andreessen Horowitz General Partner Zane Lackey said that when applications add agentic capabilities, it significantly changes how those apps behave, the things they can access, and the possible damage they can do. “Organizations need visibility into what this software can do and the ability to govern its behavior in real time,” he said. “Neo’s team has built category-defining security platforms before, and we believe they’re uniquely positioned to build the control layer this new generation of enterprise software requires.”
The problem with agentic systems is that they can act independently, mimic the behavior of humans, inherit advanced security permissions from them, and move across workflows in ways that might seem legitimate to legacy security tools built for older, deterministic software. They include the Neoverse-powered software inventory, which continuously details and updates a record of every AI agent, AI-enabled application, plugin and extension, MCP servers and traditional software that has embedded its own agentic capabilities.
Neo also provides capability and risk intelligence that shows what those agentic tools can do, what they can access and how they’re configured, plus real-time attribution tools that ensure each agent action leaves a transparent audit trail, so its work can always be checked. There are granular software control tools for enforcing group- or identity specific security policies for tool calls, API access, data movement and agentic workflows, and finally, native enforcement controls that can instantly block risky activity and malicious models.
Going forward, Neo plans to use the funds from today’s round to scale its engineering and go-to-market teams to meet the rapidly growing demand for more safeguards to secure the agentic AI revolution.
Image: Neo Security
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