The Israeli startup, founded by three ex-Wix engineers, wants to be the security checkpoint between enterprise AI agents and the systems they access.
Enterprises are deploying AI agents at a remarkable clip. The problem: nobody is really sure what those agents are doing, what they can access, or whether they’ve gone rogue. Willow, an Israeli startup that just closed a $7M seed round, is betting that gap becomes an existential headache for every company running autonomous AI.
The round, announced June 4, was led by Hetz Ventures, with prior angel contributions from Wix Co-Founder Avishai Abrahami and Wix President Nir Zohar. The funding will go toward go-to-market expansion and product development for Willow’s identity and access management platform, which is purpose-built for managing AI agents rather than human users.
What Willow actually does #
The platform provides visibility into agent activity, granular runtime permissions, audit trails, and something the company calls shadow AI detection. In English: it spots AI agents operating inside your organization that nobody officially approved or even knows about.
Willow connects securely to over 1,000 internal system connectors, covering recognized agents like ChatGPT and Gemini. The platform also includes a marketplace of more than 100 skills and plugins, along with flexible deployment options designed to fit different enterprise environments.
The founding team, Eyal Ben Ezra (CEO), Shalev Shalit (CTO), and Idan Chetrit (VP Platform), all came from Wix. The company was formerly known as Webrix before rebranding as Willow.
Willow has already deployed its platform within Wix, where it reportedly supports over 5,000 users.
Why the market is ready for this #
According to Willow’s data, 79% of companies are currently implementing AI agents. And 65% of organizations have already reported agent-related security incidents.
Traditional identity and access management tools were designed for a world where the actors were humans logging in with passwords or SSO tokens. They weren’t built for software entities that spin up, execute multi-step workflows, and shut down, all without a human in the loop.
What this means for investors and the broader market #
Willow is expanding beyond its Wix roots into cybersecurity, real estate, and fintech.
The EU’s AI Act is already creating compliance obligations around automated decision-making.
Larger identity management players like Okta and CyberArk have signaled interest in agent-related use cases, but their platforms were built for human identity first.
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