SentinelOne Vets Raise $100M to Secure AI Agents

A team of cybersecurity veterans just raised serious capital betting that the rapid rollout of AI agents inside enterprises is creating an entirely new security category, one traditional tools were never built to handle. Israeli startup Neo emerged from stealth this week with $100 million in total funding, consisting of a $75 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, plus a previously undisclosed $25 million seed round from 2025, according to Calcalist's reporting on the launch.

Neo was founded by Nick Warner, who built SentinelOne's go-to-market organization and served as its chief operating officer through its 2021 IPO, alongside Shlomi Salem, who spent more than a decade leading SentinelOne's detection engineering, and Eran Shirazi, a former Unit 8200 vulnerability researcher. The company has also attracted a notable roster of angel investors, including Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, a signal of real credibility within Israel's cybersecurity community specifically.

Neo's core argument is straightforward. Traditional enterprise security architectures were designed for software that behaves predictably and relies on human users clicking things. AI agents break that model entirely. They can reason, invoke external tools, chain together multi-step workflows, and make autonomous decisions while operating under legitimate employee permissions, making them extremely difficult to monitor using conventional endpoint or identity security products, a challenge connected to what we've covered in our guide on what AI agents actually are and how they operate differently from traditional software.

Co-founder Shlomi Salem described the specific gap Neo is targeting in comments to Calcalist. "The challenge with AI agents is that they operate with legitimate user permissions," he said. "Organizations don't always know what information those agents can access, what actions they're authorized to perform, or how they learn about the organization. Those are entirely new security questions, and that's where we operate."

Neo's platform automatically maps AI agents, AI-powered applications, browser extensions, Model Context Protocol servers, and traditional software that has acquired agentic capabilities across an organization. A continuously updated knowledge base catalogs what each component can do, what data it can access, and whether its behavior complies with organizational security policy, then records every action taken by users, agents, or applications into a detailed audit trail.

The scale of the underlying problem helps explain why investors moved quickly. According to Gartner figures cited in Neo's own announcement, only 5% of enterprise applications incorporated agentic capabilities in 2025, but that figure is expected to reach 40% by the end of 2026, an eightfold jump in a single year that leaves most enterprise security teams with essentially no runway to prepare, a trend worth tracking alongside our AI agents statistics coverage.

I've advised companies on AI adoption for four years, and Neo's raise is a genuinely important signal for any business currently deploying AI agents, coding assistants, or autonomous workflows without a clear security framework around them. Most companies I talk to are focused entirely on what AI agents can accomplish and haven't yet asked the harder question: what can this agent access, and would we know if it went wrong?

For businesses in regulated industries especially, this is worth treating as an early warning rather than a future concern. If Gartner's 40% adoption forecast for agentic capabilities holds, the security gap Neo is targeting will become a genuine operational risk for most enterprises within the next 12 months, not a hypothetical one.

Neo, founded by three former SentinelOne executives, emerged from stealth with $100 million to build security infrastructure specifically for autonomous AI agents operating inside enterprises. The platform maps and monitors every AI agent, application, and tool with access to company systems, since traditional security tools weren't built for software that can reason and act using legitimate employee permissions. Gartner expects agentic capabilities to jump from 5% to 40% of enterprise applications by the end of 2026.