Neo Emerges from Stealth with $100M to Secure AI Software

What happened

Neo Security launched publicly after raising $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Craft Ventures, and Merlin Ventures. The Boston-based startup, founded in August 2025 by Nick Warner (former president and COO of SentinelOne), Shlomi Salem, and Eran Shirazi, aims to provide security teams with tools to discover, analyze, and control AI-enabled software across enterprises. The company has been testing its platform with organizations in financial services, transportation, and energy. Neo's founding team includes former executives and engineers from SentinelOne, Wiz, and Palo Alto Networks. According to Gartner, AI agents will appear in 40% of enterprise software applications by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025, yet only 13% of organizations believe they have appropriate governance in place.

Why it matters

Enterprise applications for HR, finance, CRM, and productivity are rapidly adding autonomous AI capabilities that can access sensitive data, automate workflows, and inherit user permissions-creating significant security blind spots. Warner noted that nearly 50% of enterprise software will be agentic by the end of this year, faster than anticipated. These AI agents can choose tools, access data, and act independently while inheriting the same privileges as human users, creating new identity and access control challenges. Traditional security systems were designed for predictable software behavior and lack the ability to monitor AI interactions that occur directly on endpoints through desktop applications, coding assistants, and locally running models. Organizations cannot determine which AI functions have been introduced, what models they rely upon, or whether applications train on corporate data without dedicated visibility and control tools.

Bigger picture

The rapid adoption of autonomous AI agents represents a fundamental shift in enterprise software security. Gartner projects that an average global Fortune 500 company will use more than 150,000 agents by 2028. This creates a new category of security challenges beyond frontier AI models-the "long tail" of enterprise applications embedding AI capabilities represents a potentially larger attack surface. Neo competes with both emerging AI-security startups and established identity, privileged-access, cloud-security, and secrets-management vendors expanding their platforms. NIST launched its AI Agent Standards Initiative on February 17, 2026, with security and identity research among its three pillars, though no binding requirements exist yet. Warner believes the agentic software security market "is going to be at least as big as the endpoint security market was." For Palo Alto Networks and other established cybersecurity vendors, Neo's emergence signals growing enterprise demand for specialized AI security controls that may require platform expansion or competitive response.

What to watch

Neo must demonstrate continuous identification of approved and unsanctioned agents across SaaS products, custom applications, browser extensions, and third-party integrations. Critical proof points include whether the platform can prevent unauthorized actions in real-time or only report risky access after detection, support for task-specific permissions and short-lived credentials, and the ability to revoke access across connected applications. The company plans to scale its engineering and go-to-market teams but has not yet disclosed pricing, detailed architecture, independent performance results, or named customer deployments. Watch for technical documentation, integration coverage with major enterprise platforms, and whether Neo's endpoint-based approach proves more effective than gateway or proxy architectures used by competing vendors. Industry standards development through NIST and evolving governance frameworks will shape requirements for AI agent security controls.