Straiker raises USD $64 million to secure AI agents

Straiker has raised USD $64 million in a Series A funding round, bringing the AI security company's total funding to USD $85 million.

The round was led by Marathon Management Partners, Citi Ventures, Illuminate Financial and Workday Ventures, with continued backing from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed. As part of the deal, Gokul Rajaram, Founding Partner at Marathon, has joined Straiker's Board of Directors.

Straiker focuses on security risks linked to AI agents used inside large organisations. These systems are being deployed across routine office work, back-office processes and customer-facing operations, creating a new set of security issues as software takes action across internal systems with growing autonomy.

The company is led by Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Ankur Shah and Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Sreenath Kurupati. Shah previously oversaw Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks as Senior Vice President and General Manager, while Kurupati led AI and security research at Akamai after the company acquired Cyberfend, the fraud detection business he founded.

Straiker's platform is built around three areas: discovering AI agents in enterprise environments, testing them before deployment, and monitoring them once they are in use. It is designed to identify what agents exist inside an organisation, what systems they can reach and how they behave once active.

The pitch comes as companies face growing concern over how AI agents can be manipulated or misused. Unlike conventional software, these tools can make decisions dynamically and act independently on behalf of users, changing the controls needed to supervise them.

Recent incidents have sharpened scrutiny of the sector. Reuters reported that attackers manipulated Meta's AI support agent into changing account emails and bypassing two-factor authentication, leading to the hijacking of more than 20,000 Instagram accounts without breaching Meta's core systems.

Straiker also cited findings from adversarial testing by its STAR Labs research unit. According to the company, 36% of successful attacks on coding agents resulted in remote code execution, while 91% of attacks on productivity agents led to silent data exfiltration without malware or stolen credentials.

Growth plans

The fresh capital will be used to expand the product, support STAR Labs and increase the company's international reach. Customer demand has pushed Straiker to scale more quickly, particularly among large companies looking to deploy both internally built and third-party AI agents.

Straiker says it has been working with frontier AI labs and Fortune 500 businesses since launching in 2025. It also says run-rate revenue has increased by more than 15 times in less than a year, which it describes as reflecting demand for security tools designed for autonomous systems.

Investors are backing the company in a part of enterprise software drawing increasing attention from both boards and security teams. Research cited by Straiker from IDC forecasts that more than one billion AI agents will be deployed across enterprises by 2029, up 40-fold from 2025.

That projected growth is one reason investors are treating agent security as a distinct market rather than an extension of existing cyber products. For companies, the issue is not only whether AI agents can be secured, but whether security teams can first identify them, map access rights and test how they behave under attack.

Kurupati set out the company's view of its position in the market. "Our uniqueness comes from pairing the industry's most comprehensive agentic exploit dataset with an AI-native security engine purpose-built for autonomous threats. That foundation allows us to secure the next generation of AI-powered enterprises," said Kurupati.

External security leaders are also framing the issue as a broader operational challenge. "AI agents are getting the keys to real systems and real data, which makes securing them one of the defining challenges of this era. I'm glad to work with innovative teams like Straiker that are focused on getting it right," said Brad Jones, Chief Information Security Officer.

Shah said the company is seeing demand beyond its original expectations. "Demand is outpacing anything we forecast," said Shah. "This round goes straight into product, our STAR Labs threat research, and the global expansion our enterprise customers are pulling us toward."

Rajaram, who is joining the board, said the rise of autonomous software required a dedicated security approach. "Given their scope and autonomy, AI agents need to be treated like first-class citizens," said Rajaram. "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."