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Neo just came out of stealth with $100M from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners to build a control layer for AI agents — the kind of governance enterprises will need as autonomous software goes from a security team's afterthought to their biggest new attack surface.
With Gartner projecting agentic capabilities will jump from 5% to 40% of enterprise applications by year's end, is security about to become the default line item on every AI agent budget, or will enterprises keep shipping first and asking questions later?
In Today’s Startup News Recap:
Neo raises $100M to control enterprise AI agents
Natural raises $30M to build Stripe for agents
Empirical Security lands $25M for predictive cyber AI
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Neo emerged from stealth with $100M in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures also participating, to build a real-time control layer that lets enterprise security teams inventory, govern, and secure AI agents operating across their systems.
What’s the Deal?
Neo’s platform gives SecOps teams software inventory, risk intelligence, and real-time attribution across AI agents, plugins, extensions, and traditional software gaining autonomous capabilities.
Founders Nick Warner, Shlomi Salem, and Eran Shirazi built the company on backgrounds at SentinelOne and Israel’s Unit 8200 threat-research division.
Gartner data cited in the announcement projects agentic capabilities will jump from 5% of enterprise applications in 2025 to 40% by the end of 2026.
Why care?
Enterprises are adopting AI agents faster than security teams can vet them, and Neo is betting that governance becomes a mandatory line item as autonomous software spreads across every department. Backing from a16z and Bessemer signals investors expect “who watches the agents” to become one of enterprise AI’s biggest new budget categories.
Natural raised a $30M Series A led by Forerunner Ventures’ Kirsten Green, pushing its total funding past $40M just 193 days after founding, to build payments infrastructure that lets AI agents move money, collect payments, and transact with humans and other agents autonomously.
What’s the Deal?
Natural has already brought six products to general availability, including FDIC-insured agent wallets, one-way vaults, and payment, request, and transfer tools, with three more launching soon.
The funding round drew backers including Brex, Mercury, and Vercel, alongside Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari and existing investors.
Founder Kahlil Lalji previously built Ivella, a YC-backed banking startup for couples that sold to Earnin in 2023, and stocked Natural’s team with alumni from Stripe, Ramp, and Square.
Why care?
If AI agents start transacting at computer speed instead of human speed, the payments market could grow by orders of magnitude, and whoever owns that rail captures a structural advantage. Forerunner’s bet signals investors think the agent economy needs its own financial plumbing, not a bolt-on to systems built for people.
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Empirical Security raised a $25M Series A led by Brightmind Partners, bringing its total funding to $37M, to expand its AI models that predict which software vulnerabilities attackers will actually exploit rather than leaving security teams to chase every disclosed flaw.
What’s the Deal?
The company’s Foundation model monitors more than 18,000 exploited CVEs to forecast which vulnerabilities pose real organizational risk, while its Radiant engine is tuned to each customer’s specific threat profile.
Founders Ed Bellis, Michael Roytman, and Jay Jacobs previously built Kenna Security, sold to Cisco, and Jacobs co-created the industry-standard Exploit Prediction Scoring System.
Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Report, which incorporates Empirical’s data, found vulnerability exploitation now drives 31% of confirmed breaches, up from 20% a year earlier.
Why care?
As the volume of disclosed vulnerabilities keeps outpacing what security teams can manually triage, predictive prioritization is shifting from a nice-to-have to the product category cybersecurity budgets get built around. Empirical’s founding team’s track record at Kenna, itself built and sold on the same thesis, gives investors a credible reason to bet the pattern repeats.
The Shortlist
Etched seeks a $20B valuation this week in a new round led by Jane Street, a fourfold jump as the AI inference chip startup bets it can chip away at Nvidia’s dominance.
Quorum landed a strategic investment from Enlightenment Capital to accelerate its AI-powered public affairs platform, which already serves more than 2,000 organizations tracking legislation and advocacy.
Tempus AI agreed to acquire cancer-testing firm Personalis for $1.5B in stock, expanding its AI-driven precision oncology platform with a blood test that tracks tumor DNA after treatment.