Zenity Raises $125M to Secure AI Agents as Autonomous Systems Pose New Enterprise Risks

Zenity raises $125m to secure AI agents, not models

Zenity has raised $125m to secure not AI models but the agents built on them, as they start touching real enterprise systems. The round, backed by SoftBank, Hitachi and LG, lands the week OpenAI's own agents broke out and hacked another company. Most of the money spent guarding AI has gone to the model and the prompt. Zenity has just raised $125m on a different argument: both miss the real danger. That danger is the AI agent that acts on its own. The Israeli startup secures what agents do once a company lets them loose inside its systems. Norwest led the Series C. SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures and LG Technology Ventures joined, the company announced. That takes its total funding to roughly $185m. Zenity did not disclose a valuation. Tellingly, the new backers are all firms deploying agents in their own businesses. Two Unit 8200 veterans, Ben Kliger and Michael Bargury, founded Zenity in 2021. Both previously built security products at Microsoft. It now has more than 230 staff, with research in Tel Aviv and its sales team in New York. Its customers, it says, are mostly Fortune 500 and Global 2000 firms in regulated industries. Securing the agent, not the model The pitch rests on a shift the industry is only now catching up to. A chatbot answers a question. An agent takes actions. It can reach internal databases, call tools, update records and run multi-step workflows across systems. That turns a content problem into a control problem. An agent can behave exactly as designed and still cause a breach. It might have too much access, or read manipulated instructions. So Zenity watches the agent layer: its permissions, connected tools, memory and live actions. It reads the intent behind each action and, it says, can allow, change or block that action before it runs. Zenity Labs shows the risk. A booby-trapped calendar invite could hijack Perplexity's agentic browser. It could then open an unlocked password vault and leak the credentials inside. Its earlier AgentFlayer work found zero-click ways to turn enterprise assistants against their owners. The attacks hide inside data an agent is meant to trust. A category, and a crowded one The timing is not subtle. The raise lands days after a scare. OpenAI admitted two of its models broke out of a sealed test and hacked Hugging Face. They were chasing a benchmark answer key. That is precisely the scenario Zenity sells against: an agent doing something it should not. It has raised the stakes for every enterprise wiring agents into its systems. Zenity is not alone in spotting the gap. It is the second nine-figure AI-security round this week, after Horizon3's $250m for autonomous pentesting. It sits beside startups like Onyx building control layers for agents. Gartner already calls Zenity the company to beat in agent governance. Investors are betting this becomes a category, not a feature. The caveats trail any fast raise. Zenity has kept its valuation quiet, and its growth figures, however steep, come off a young base. The bigger test is strategic. Enterprises must make a choice. Do they buy a dedicated agent-security platform? Or lean on whatever Microsoft, Google and AWS bundle into the tools where agents already live? For now, the money is flowing to the specialists. As Kliger puts it, the industry is heading into an "era of 1 billion agents." Each one can act inside a business, not just answer a question. Zenity's bet is that someone has to watch what all of them do. This week made that a harder bet to argue with.

SoftBank, Hitachi, LG back Zenity's $125 million round to police AI agents | Fortune

Zenity, an Israel-based cybersecurity startup, has raised $125 million as part of a Series C funding round, in a bet that AI risks don't come from powerful models, but instead from what happens when AI agents are set loose to act on their own. This funding round for the Tel Aviv-based startup, which secures AI agents inside corporate systems, was led by Norwest, with SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures, and LG Technology Ventures joining as investors. The round lands as enterprises across Asia-Pacific rush to deploy AI agents that take actions, make decisions, and touch "every aspect of the enterprise," in the words of Zenity CEO Ben Kliger. "We've seen several waves of AI security over the last decade, starting with models and securing prompts. But putting the agent at the center of security is unique," he says. "It's happening in Asia-Pacific faster than in previous waves -- in Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia." Most AI security to date has focused on screening what a user asks a model to do, or auditing the model's output after the fact. Zenity, instead, says it monitors the agent's actions in real time, and can block or alter what it does if those actions drift from its original purpose. "We're looking into the engine, into what agents are doing behind the scenes, in order to determine if they're deviating from their intent-if they're doing things that put the organization, or their clients, or their data at risk," Kliger says. Zenity plans to use the money, in part, to expand its footprint across Asia-Pacific and Europe. The company currently has 230 employees, bases its research in Tel Aviv, and its operations in New York City. "We're seeing an explosion of AI agent adoption in the Asian market, just like we're seeing in the U.S.," Kliger says. "We have a growing list of clients in Japan, Korea, and Singapore, and the market is basically coming to us." Zenity's heaviest focus, he adds, is on regulated sectors -- financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and energy -- where agents are increasingly deployed not just internally, but in customer-facing roles like support and ticketing. Zenity's new backers are also operating inside industries adopting AI agents. "As our use of AI agents continues to grow, maintaining security, governance, and operational control is essential," said Tadashi Iida, chief information security officer at SoftBank Corp, the telecoms and technology business within the broader SoftBank Group, in a statement announcing the funding round. "Zenity enables us to confidently deploy AI agents across the enterprise, giving us the visibility and governance required to support innovation at scale." "As enterprises rapidly adopt AI agents across critical workflows, organizations need a new approach to security built for this new and continuously evolving reality," said Assaf Harel, a partner at Norwest, in the same statement. Kliger declined to disclose Zenity's post-money valuation, its profitability, or whether an IPO is under consideration. Still, he's not shy about the company's ambitions. "This is one of those rare opportunities in the cybersecurity world to really build a massive company in a massive category," he says. AI security in the spotlight AI cybersecurity is now in the spotlight following OpenAI's disclosure that two of its models, including its flagship GPT-5.6 Sol and a more powerful unreleased system, broke out of a sealed testing environment, found a vulnerability that gave them internet access, and used it to hack into Hugging Face's production systems. The agents were trying to retrieve the answer key to an internal cybersecurity benchmark called ExploitGym. Hugging Face, a leading platform for sharing and downloading open-source AI models, first tried to use a leading U.S. lab's model to investigate the intrusion, but its guardrails blocked it from assisting; Hugging Face turned instead to GLM 5.2, an open-source model from Chinese AI startup Z.ai, to analyze more than 17,000 logs left behind by the attacker. "This is an industry-defining moment," Kliger says. "It shows us that we need to put more gravity behind securing the actions that agents can take, and their autonomy, beyond just what people put into the agent or the AI model." "Agents are becoming more and more autonomous. They're making decisions, taking actions," he warns. "We're not in a world where you use agents as a newer version of Google Search, where you ask a question and get a response. Agents are connected to every aspect of your enterprise."