AIR Security, a six-month-old Tel Aviv startup, came out of stealth on September 1 with $50 million in seed funding to sell what its founders describe as a firewall for AI agents. The round closed in two tranches inside the company's first half-year: Sequoia Capital led an initial $10 million, followed by a $40 million round led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, with participation from security-focused firm Swish Ventures, Netz, and angel investors including Wiz co-founder Yinon Costica, Eon co-founder Ofir Ehrlich, Clay co-founder Varun Anand, and former U.S. deputy national security adviser Anne Neuberger.

What the product does

AIR was founded by CEO Yair Saban and CTO Niv Hoffman, who met roughly a decade ago and both spent years in Unit 8200, the cyber-intelligence arm of the Israeli military, before starting the company in February 2026. The platform discovers which AI agents are running inside a company, continuously vets the third-party skills, tools, plugins and other add-ons those agents connect to, and blocks interactions with components or external services that fail its security checks. AIR also runs a marketplace of pre-vetted agent skills and add-ons, aiming to give enterprises a trusted supply chain for agent capabilities rather than an unreviewed grab-bag of connectors. The roughly 40-person company also recently hired Ryan Knisley, formerly CISO at both Disney and Costco, as chief strategy officer.

Why now

The pitch mirrors an argument security vendors have made about software supply chains for years — that as organizations plug ever more third-party components into critical systems, provenance and vetting become the bottleneck — applied to the current wave of enterprise AI agents wired into internal tools, codebases and customer data. As functions such as coding, customer support and back-office operations delegate more work to autonomous agents, unreviewed skills or connectors become a new attack surface: a malicious or poorly-vetted plugin can give an agent — and by extension an attacker — a path into systems that a traditional network firewall doesn't cover.

Why it matters

AIR joins a fast-growing cluster of "agent security" and "agent governance" startups that have raised venture funding through 2026 as enterprises scale up agent deployments faster than their security tooling has kept pace. A $50 million seed round inside six months of founding — and before the company has publicly detailed enterprise customers — signals investor conviction that agent-supply-chain security will become a distinct, well-funded category rather than a feature bolted onto existing identity or endpoint security products.