AIR, an AI security startup, emerged from stealth on September 1, 2026, announcing $50 million raised across two seed rounds to help companies monitor and control the tools their AI agents use.
The company was founded by Yair Saban (CEO) and Niv Hoffman (CTO), both veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence corps, where they worked on offensive cybersecurity. AIR’s platform discovers AI agents running inside a company, continuously vets the skills, plugins, MCP servers, and add-ons those agents rely on, and blocks interactions with software or external sources that fail its security criteria. The company also operates a marketplace of pre-vetted add-ons and skills.
The two funding rounds closed within weeks of each other — a $10 million first round led by Sequoia, and a $40 million second round led by Greenoaks. Angel investors included Zach Frankel (president of Cognition), Yinon Costica (co-founder of Wiz), Ofir Erlich (co-founder of Eon), Varun Anand (co-founder of Clay), and Anne Neuberger, among others.
Saban framed the problem by drawing a parallel to early PC security: just as unsigned drivers once posed risks to operating systems before code-signing became standard, the tools AI agents use today lack equivalent oversight. He argues that as agents operate more autonomously across enterprise systems, attackers could target the content agents consume rather than the agents themselves. AIR says it currently filters out roughly 27% of the skills and add-ons it finds online, and counts more than 20 customers, approximately a quarter of which are large enterprises. Demand has been strongest in financial services and pharmaceuticals.
AIR operates in a competitive space. Rivals including Noma Security, Zenity, Astrix Security, and Operant AI offer overlapping capabilities. Zenity raised $125 million in a Series C in August, and Noma raised $100 million in a Series B last year.
Saban said AIR’s differentiation lies in continuous re-verification of the skills ecosystem rather than one-time scanning. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky echoed that view, describing the challenge as “an infrastructure problem long before it is a security problem.” AIR currently employs around 40 people, and plans to use the new capital to hire researchers and expand its go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and Europe.
Source: TechCrunch