AI-agent security startup AIR emerged from stealth on September 1, 2026 with $50 million in seed funding to build what its founders describe as a firewall for AI agents. The New York-based company, founded in February by Israeli Unit 8200 alumni Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, said the money arrived in two back-to-back rounds — $10 million led by Sequoia Capital, then $40 million led by Greenoaks Capital — closed within weeks of each other.
Vetting an agent's supply chain in real time
AIR argues that skills, plug-ins, MCP servers and other add-ons that autonomous agents pull in on the fly have become a new enterprise software supply chain, one that has grown far faster than security teams can audit. Its platform discovers agents already running across endpoints, cloud accounts and SaaS applications, and continuously re-checks any tool or component those agents load.
27% of public add-ons fail the check
Company researchers say they have inspected more than 17,800 public AI add-ons representing 6.7 million installations, and roughly 27% get filtered out. The team has surfaced skills impersonating Anthropic and OpenAI capabilities that could execute arbitrary code once installed. AIR runs its own marketplace of pre-vetted add-ons, and blocks untrusted tools or injected instructions at runtime before an agent acts on them.
Backed by cybersecurity founders as agent security consolidates
Angel investors include Wiz co-founder Yinon Costica, Clay co-founder Varun Anand, Eon co-founder Ofir Ehrlich, Cognition president Zach Frankel and former White House deputy national security adviser for cyber Anne Neuberger. Roughly 40 people work at AIR today, with more than 20 customers, about a quarter of them large enterprises in financial services and pharmaceuticals.
AIR joins a crowded but well-funded field. Zenity raised a $125 million Series C in August, Noma Security closed a $100 million Series B last year, and Astrix and Operant AI are chasing similar problems. Backers argue AIR's continuous re-verification pipeline is the moat. The pitch echoes broader industry moves such as CrowdStrike's SafeMind launch with NVIDIA Nemotron and Anthropic's own $35B Lambda deal.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, SiliconANGLE, Ctech and Superpower Daily.