Straiker raises $64M to secure AI agents as enterprises face new threats from autonomous systems

Straiker raises $64M to secure enterprise AI agents

Straiker has raised a $64mn Series A, led by Marathon, to secure the AI agents flooding into enterprises, a workforce IDC expects to top a billion by 2029 and that traditional security tools were never built to watch. AI agents are pouring into companies, and most security tools were never built to watch them. Straiker wants to fix that. The startup has just raised $64mn to police a workforce that does not clock in. The Series A was revealed first by Axios. It takes the Mountain View company's total funding to $85mn. Marathon Management Partners led the round. Citi Ventures, Illuminate Financial and Workday Ventures joined, with earlier backers Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed returning. Securing a workforce that never sleeps Straiker calls itself the agentic security company, and the pitch is simple. AI agents now book travel, write code and run back-office tasks. They act on their own across company systems. That independence is useful and risky in equal measure. Old security tools assume software follows fixed rules. Agents do not. They reason on the fly and take actions no one scripted. That leaves a gap traditional controls cannot cover, the company said in its announcement. The scale of the shift is the selling point. Research firm IDC expects more than a billion AI agents inside enterprises by 2029. That is around 40 times the number in 2025. No corporate workforce has ever grown that fast. What can go wrong The threat is not theoretical. This spring, Reuters reported a striking case. Attackers talked Meta's AI support agent into changing account emails and skipping two-factor checks. They hijacked more than 20,000 Instagram accounts without ever breaching Meta's core systems. Straiker's own research arm, STAR Labs, found similar weak spots in testing. It said 36% of successful attacks on coding agents led to remote code execution. Another 91% of attacks on productivity agents ended in quiet data theft, with no malware and no stolen passwords. The company's platform tries to close those holes in three steps. It finds the agents already running in a business. It stress-tests them for flaws before launch. Then it watches them in real time to stop attacks as they unfold. Pedigree and traction The founders come from the security world. Chief executive Ankur Shah previously ran Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Cloud business. Chief technology officer Sreenath Kurupati led AI and security research at Akamai, after it bought his fraud-detection startup Cyberfend. Since launching in 2025, Straiker has sold to frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 firms. It says run-rate revenue has grown more than 15-fold in under a year. "Demand is outpacing anything we forecast," Shah said. The cash will go into the product, the STAR Labs research team and overseas expansion. Marathon's Gokul Rajaram is joining the board. A crowded new frontier Straiker is not alone in spotting the opening. A rush of startups now sells tools to test, govern and secure AI agents. They cover everything from non-human identity to agent access governance. Investors are betting that as agents get the keys to real systems, someone has to hold them to account. The risk for the category is that big security vendors fold the same features into their suites. Straiker's bet is that agents are different enough to need a dedicated guard. If IDC's numbers are anywhere close, the market it is chasing will be huge. So will the cost of getting it wrong.

Straiker lands $64M to defend enterprise AI agents from attack

Agentic security company Straiker Inc. today revealed that it had raised $64 million in new funding to expand a platform built to secure the artificial intelligence agents now spreading across enterprise systems. The Mountain View, California-based company sells agentic security, software that discovers AI agents running inside an organization, tests them for weaknesses ahead of deployment and monitors their behavior once they go live. Straiker emerged publicly in March 2025 with $21 million in initial funding. Agents differ from traditional software in that they reason on the fly and act on their own across connected systems. Straiker argues that independence opens a class of risk that older, rule-based controls were not designed to catch. Recent incidents have made the threat concrete. BleepingComputer reported earlier this month that attackers tricked Meta Platforms Inc.'s AI support agent into resetting account passwords, hijacking more than 20,000 Instagram accounts that lacked two-factor authentication without breaching Meta's core systems. In adversarial testing by Straiker's STAR Labs research arm, the company said 36% of successful attacks on coding agents led to remote code execution, while 91% of attacks on productivity agents resulted in silent data theft that left behind no malware and no stolen credentials. Straiker's platform combines three functions: discovery of agents across an enterprise, pre-deployment testing to surface vulnerabilities and runtime protection that blocks threats as they occur. The company says threats caught in production feed back into its testing, while flaws found in testing harden its live defenses. Its work with frontier AI labs, it added, gives early sight of new attack techniques. The founders carry security pedigrees. Chief Executive Ankur Shah previously ran Palo Alto Networks Inc.'s Prisma Cloud business as senior vice president and general manager, while Chief Technology Officer Sreenath Kurupati led AI and security research at Akamai Technologies Inc. after it acquired Cyberfend Inc., the fraud detection startup he founded. "Demand is outpacing anything we forecast," Shah said in a statement. "This round goes straight into product, our STAR Labs threat research and the global expansion our enterprise customers are pulling us toward." The company said run-rate revenue has grown more than 15-fold in under a year. It counts frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 companies among its customers. The Series A round was led by Marathon Management Partners alongside Citi Ventures, Illuminate Ventures and Workday Ventures, with prior backers Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners LP also taking part. Gokul Rajaram, a founding partner at Marathon, is joining Straiker's board.