Neo Security's $100M Raise Bets That Agentic Software Is Now the Biggest Enterprise Attack Surface

3. Neo Security's $100M Raise Bets That Agentic Software Is Now the Biggest Enterprise Attack Surface

Neo Security Inc. exited stealth on July 20, 2026, announcing a $100 million funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures also participating. The company, built by former executives and engineers from SentinelOne, Wiz, and Palo Alto Networks, is targeting a specific gap: enterprises cannot see or govern AI agents operating inside applications they already trust. Neo's platform gives security operations teams a continuous inventory of every AI agent, AI-enabled app, plugin, MCP server, and extension running across their organization, along with posture intelligence and real-time policy controls to respond when a tool's risk profile changes.

The strategic logic rests on a Gartner projection that roughly 5% of enterprise applications had agentic features at the end of 2025, rising to over 40% by the end of 2026. That trajectory means the attack surface is not expanding at the edge of an organization's software stack. It is expanding inside applications that security teams already consider approved. Legacy tools from CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks, and SentinelOne were built for deterministic software. Agentic systems reason, invoke tools, inherit user permissions, and move across workflows in ways that look legitimate to those older detection models. Neo is positioning itself as the category-defining answer to that blind spot, before the incumbents can ship credible responses.

The founding team's pedigree matters here. Nicholas Warner and colleagues built category-defining platforms at Wiz and SentinelOne before those companies reached scale. A16z General Partner Zane Lackey named that track record explicitly in the announcement. The next signal to watch: whether the major cloud providers, Microsoft, Google, or AWS, move to acquire or replicate this control-layer capability as agentic features ship natively inside their own enterprise software suites. If they do, Neo's window to establish an independent standard narrows fast.

Source: Neo Security bags $100M to build the secure control layer for enterprise AI agents