AIR raised $50M to vet the tools AI agents use
Illustration, not documentary evidence of the event.
AIR emerged from stealth with $50 million raised across two seed rounds to build security software for AI agents and their tools, according to techcrunch.com. CEO Yair Saban said Sequoia led the $10 million first round and Greenoaks led the $40 million second round, which closed within weeks of each other.
The company says its platform finds agents operating inside businesses, checks their skills, plug-ins and other components, and intercepts actions to block access that fails its security criteria. It also offers a marketplace of vetted tools. Saban argues that approval needs to be revisited because a tool’s dependencies can change or its developer’s account can be compromised.
For a buyer, the useful distinction is between approving a tool once and deciding whether it is still safe when an agent uses it. AIR’s pitch suggests procurement teams should ask vendors to demonstrate what happens after an approved component changes: what gets checked again, when enforcement takes effect, and what the agent can do while that assessment is pending. The report describes AIR’s approach but does not establish its performance on those questions.
Saban said AIR filters out about 27% of the add-ons and skills it finds online. That is a company-reported filtering rate, not a measured share of malicious tools. Without the rejection criteria or evidence about mistaken approvals and rejections, buyers cannot use it to judge protection or potential disruption. AIR’s claim of more than 20 customers likewise establishes neither effectiveness nor the breadth of deployment.
The competitive question is whether that recurring assessment adds enough value alongside existing controls. The report names Noma Security, Zenity, Astrix Security and Operant AI as overlapping providers. For teams comparing them, a concrete evaluation would follow the same approved tool through a dependency change and compare detection, enforcement and the explanation given to administrators. That would test the capability AIR calls its advantage more directly than a funding total or marketplace size.
Correction, September 19, 2026: This article was revised to attribute reported claims, remove unsupported statements and clarify the limits of the available evidence.