{"slug": "oligo-lands-60m-to-shield-ai-agents-from-real-time-attacks", "title": "Oligo Lands $60M to Shield AI Agents From Real-Time Attacks", "summary": "Oligo, a cybersecurity startup, has raised $60 million in funding to extend its runtime protection technology to AI agents, bringing its total funding to $140 million. The round was led by Ballistic Ventures, Canon Capital, Greenfield Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Red Dot Capital, and TLV Partners. CEO Nadav Czerninski said the company is the only solution that can block attacks without taking down the application in runtime, addressing the shrinking window between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation.", "body_md": "Cybersecurity startup Oligo has closed a $60 million funding round aimed at extending its runtime protection technology to [AI agents](https://www.kobaran.com/tag/AIAgents), a category of software that enterprises are deploying faster than most security teams can track. The raise arrives at a moment when businesses are racing to embed autonomous, tool-using AI systems into core operations, often without fully understanding the exposure that creates.\n\nThe round was led by Ballistic Ventures, Canon Capital, Greenfield Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Red Dot Capital and TLV Partners. It pushes Oligo’s total funding to $140 million and follows a $50 million Series B closed in January 2025, itself led by Greenfield Partners. For a company built around defending live application environments, the timing lines up with a broader industry shift: security spending is increasingly following wherever AI agents go.\n\nOligo’s pitch centers on a specific and increasingly urgent problem. As organizations hand more decision-making and system access to AI agents, traditional detection methods, built for slower-moving software vulnerabilities, are struggling to keep pace. Company leadership says the new capital will go toward broadening how Oligo monitors and blocks exploitation attempts against these agents while they are actually running.\n\n## Why Runtime Security Is Becoming a Board-Level Issue for AI Agents\n\nNadav Czerninski, Oligo’s co-founder and CEO, said the company built its core detection technology before agentic AI became a mainstream enterprise priority, giving it a head start as demand shifted. Czerninski, who spent more than six years leading the Israeli Military’s cyber research team before co-founding Oligo in 2022, said the company now positions itself as the only vendor able to block active attacks without interrupting the application it is protecting.\n\n“We’re building the leading runtime security platform to protect cloud-native and agentic applications, and we’re actually the only solution that can block attacks without taking down the application in runtime,” Czerninski said in comments provided to ISMG. He attributed that capability to what Oligo calls deep app inspection, a method for observing live code execution in a way designed not to interfere with normal operations.\n\n### The Shrinking Window Between Disclosure and Exploitation\n\nA major driver behind Oligo’s approach is a trend security researchers have flagged across the industry for several years: the gap between when a vulnerability is publicly disclosed and when attackers begin exploiting it has all but disappeared. Czerninski said that gap has effectively gone negative, meaning exploitation sometimes begins before defenders have finished rolling out a fix.\n\n“We’re seeing the exploit window being faster than ever,” Czerninski said. “In the past, once there was a patch out, you had time to patch it. Now we’re seeing a negative amount of days, meaning once the patch is out, attackers already leverage it. Organizations really have to have something to protect themselves.”\n\nThat compressed timeline is a central reason Oligo is emphasizing runtime blocking over slower, investigation-heavy response cycles, particularly as AI agents introduce new categories of risk that did not exist in traditional software stacks.\n\n### What Makes AI Agents Harder to Secure Than Standard Software\n\nUnlike conventional applications, AI agents make autonomous decisions, call external tools and functions, and translate natural-language prompts into real system actions. Czerninski said defending this kind of environment requires visibility that starts well before the code executes and follows the entire chain of decisions an agent makes.\n\n“We added the ability to see not just the action that happens on the operating system, but we see agentic applications and everything that happens in them from the prompt itself to those tool calls and function calls down to the actual system call detect on the operating system,” Czerninski said. “The agentic applications require us to add another level of deep visibility to monitor from prompt to action.”\n\nOligo’s underlying data collection, tracing application activity down to the operating system level, is not new. What has changed, Czerninski said, is how the company interprets and acts on that data specifically for AI agents.\n\n“The main difference is how we productize around that data,” he said. “We collect the same data, very deep, the deepest data that anyone can get from runtime, and then based on that, the threat detections that we’re adding and the different ways to extract the data to understand what models are being used, what tools are being used and then how they behave at runtime.”\n\n#### Cutting Through Vulnerability Noise\n\nOne practical benefit of this visibility, according to Czerninski, is sharper vulnerability prioritization. Rather than treating every flagged vulnerability as equally urgent, Oligo says it can determine whether a specific vulnerable function is actually being executed in production.\n\n“We can see what the actual functions that are being used are,” Czerninski said. “And many times, 90% of the vulnerabilities aren’t exploitable because they are not running the vulnerable function.”\n\n## How Widely Are AI Agents Already Running in the Enterprise?\n\nTraditional cloud-native applications still make up the bulk of production workloads Oligo observes, but Czerninski said usage of large language model applications and tool-calling agents is climbing steadily. He said every one of Oligo’s customers has adopted AI in some form, and the number of agents active inside enterprise environments keeps growing, often faster than internal teams realize.\n\n“We’re seeing more and more the use of AI applications with the standard LLMs, but also identical applications with tool calls,” Czerninski said. “And many times, we’re seeing our customers surprised with how many applications that they have, how many agents they have running in their environment without them knowing.”\n\nThat visibility gap, sometimes described in the industry as agent sprawl or shadow AI, is becoming a common concern among chief information security officers as AI Agents move from pilot projects into production systems that touch sensitive data and critical infrastructure.\n\n### Snapshot: Oligo’s Growth Since Founding\n\n| Metric | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Founded | 2022 |\n| CEO and Co-founder | Nadav Czerninski |\n| Employees | 129 |\n| Total funding raised | $140 million |\n| Latest round | $60 million |\n| Previous round | $50 million Series B (January 2025) |\n| Lead investors, latest round | Ballistic Ventures, Canon Capital, Greenfield Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Red Dot Capital, TLV Partners |\n\n## Where the New Funding Is Headed\n\nCzerninski said the fresh capital will primarily support expanding coverage and deployment flexibility for Oligo’s exploit-blocking technology. He pointed to two priority use cases: persistent protection against unknown vulnerabilities in software libraries that generate recurring security flaws, and virtual patching, which allows Oligo to issue targeted protection against a newly disclosed CVE before a formal patch is applied.\n\n“Relying just on hygiene and relying on post-exploit detection of that is just not relevant anymore,” Czerninski said. “In today’s world, you have to start with actually blocking the exploit, and only then patching and doing the routine hygiene that is always important.”\n\n### Broader Industry Context\n\nOligo’s raise lands amid a wave of venture investment targeting security for AI Agents and agentic infrastructure, as investors bet that traditional application security tools were not designed for software that can independently plan, reason and act. Analysts covering the cybersecurity funding landscape have noted that runtime and identity-focused protections for autonomous AI systems have become one of the more active investment categories of the past year, as enterprises look for ways to adopt AI Agents without expanding their attack surface unchecked.\n\nFor organizations already running AI Agents in production, or planning to, the core question Oligo is betting on is whether security can keep pace with autonomy. As agentic systems take on more responsibility inside enterprise networks, runtime-level defenses like the ones Oligo is building may become a standard requirement rather than an optional safeguard.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oligo-lands-60m-to-shield-ai-agents-from-real-time-attacks", "canonical_source": "https://www.kobaran.com/oligo-lands-60m-to-shield-ai-agents-from-real-time-attacks/", "published_at": "2026-08-16 00:55:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-16 01:11:19.314761+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-agents"], "entities": ["Oligo", "Ballistic Ventures", "Canon Capital", "Greenfield Partners", "Lightspeed Venture Partners", "Red Dot Capital", "TLV Partners", "Nadav Czerninski"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oligo-lands-60m-to-shield-ai-agents-from-real-time-attacks", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oligo-lands-60m-to-shield-ai-agents-from-real-time-attacks.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oligo-lands-60m-to-shield-ai-agents-from-real-time-attacks.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/oligo-lands-60m-to-shield-ai-agents-from-real-time-attacks.jsonld"}}