Obsidian Security raises $85M as AI agents create cybersecurity’s next major attack surface
Obsidian Security Inc. has raised an $85 million Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of $1.1 billion as enterprises increasingly look to secure autonomous artificial intelligence agents accessing cloud applications, Chief Executive Hasan Imam said today in an exclusive interview with theCUBE with me at our NYSE Wired studio in NYC.
The round was led by Crescent Cove Advisor with participation from Greylock Partners and Menlo Ventures . The funding comes as enterprise start adopting autonomous agents with access to corporate data, software code, and other critical enterprise systems required to power the new AI agentic workloads.
According to the CEO, the money will be used to expand research and development and accelerate go-to-market investments as organizations rapidly adopt AI agents that interact with enterprise software using non-human identities.
“The raise is on the back of two things,” Imam said. “We have seen incredible growth among our largest customers, with more than 14 customers paying us more than $1 million annually and more than 100 customers paying over $100,000 per year. The second is what we’ve seen over the last year with agents accessing data inside third-party applications.”
Imam said more than 65% of the company’s enterprise customers have already granted AI agents access to data within third-party software-as-a-service applications, creating new security challenges that traditional identity and access management platforms were not designed to address.
The rapid adoption of AI agents is creating a new category of cybersecurity focused on non-human identities. Unlike employees, autonomous agents authenticate through application programming interfaces, OAuth tokens and machine credentials, allowing them to interact directly with cloud applications and enterprise data.
During the interview, Imam said enterprises need governance capabilities that extend beyond provisioning access to monitoring and controlling what agents can do after they begin operating.
“We talk a lot about agent governance,” Imam said. “But once the agents have access to the applications, then we are in runtime. The agents are interacting with a non-human identity inside the third-party application to act on data. Our ability to provide governance and runtime enforcement, where we can prevent catastrophic actions inside third-party applications, is a unique capability.”
The shift reflects broader changes in enterprise software architectures as AI systems increasingly perform tasks once handled by employees.
Organizations are entering an era in which AI agents will operate across multiple platforms, creating new governance requirements. We’re starting to see reasoning come in as a different mechanism with AI. They’re touching resources, they’re touching storage, they’re touching memory, they’re doing work. This is a huge issue, and they’re are going to have identities.
Imam argued the industry’s traditional approach to cybersecurity—detecting threats and relying on security operations teams to investigate alerts—will not be sufficient as AI agents operate at machine speed.
“The concept of detection and response doesn’t work in the agentic world,” he said. “Agents move in seconds, maybe milliseconds. The provider that detects it also has to resolve it and prevent it. It is not going to be acceptable for something to be detected and then responded to hours or days later.”
The company believes securing interactions between applications, AI agents and cloud services will become one of the fastest-growing segments of enterprise cybersecurity as organizations expand the use of autonomous systems.
Imam said enterprises are unlikely to centralize AI agent identities the same way they manage employee identities because agents will operate across multiple departments, cloud providers and third-party platforms. Instead, Obsidian expects organizations to deploy governance alongside emerging AI infrastructure such as Model Context Protocol servers and gateways, providing runtime controls over what agents are permitted to do inside enterprise applications.
The funding comes as enterprises accelerate AI deployments while balancing productivity gains against growing security risks. As organizations grant AI agents broader access to business systems, cybersecurity vendors are racing to develop new platforms capable of governing autonomous software operating outside traditional human identity frameworks.
Video Interview at theCUBE’s NYSE Wired Studio
Here is my video with CEO discussing the news
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