$64M · AI + Straiker

What they're building

Straiker secures AI agents the way older tools secured applications, except agents break every assumption those tools were built on. An agent doesn't just process input; it interprets intent, decides on actions, calls tools, and executes multi-step workflows autonomously. Straiker's platform does three things: discovers the AI agents already running inside a company (including shadow deployments nobody approved), stress-tests them adversarially before launch (Ascend AI), and protects them at runtime (Defend AI). The two halves feed each other — attacks seen in production harden pre-deployment tests, and vulnerabilities found in testing sharpen runtime defenses. Their in-house research arm, STAR Labs, found that 36% of successful attacks on coding agents led to remote code execution and 91% of attacks on productivity agents ended in silent data exfiltration with no malware and no stolen credentials. The company claims 98.1% threat detection accuracy, though that figure is founder-stated, not independently benchmarked.

Why this matters

The investor list is the story: Citi Ventures and Workday Ventures are strategic investors whose parent companies are exactly the kind of enterprises deploying agents at scale, and Gokul Rajaram (ex-Google, ex-Square, ex-DoorDash) led for Marathon and took a board seat. The market timing is grimly concrete: Reuters reported this spring that attackers manipulated Meta's AI support agent into changing account emails and bypassing 2FA, hijacking 20,000+ Instagram accounts without breaching Meta's core systems. IDC projects over a billion enterprise AI agents by 2029, a 40x increase from 2025. Rajaram's quote frames the thesis: 'Enterprises need a purpose-built solution given the magnitude of the problem. Straiker will be one of the few companies that define how agents are secured.' The risk to weigh: big security vendors (Palo Alto, CrowdStrike) will fold agent security into their suites, so Straiker is racing to define the category before consolidation.