Most of the money spent guarding AI has gone to the model and the prompt. Zenity has just raised $125m on a different argument: both miss the real danger. That danger is the AI agent that acts on its own. The Israeli startup secures what agents do once a company lets them loose inside its systems.
Norwest led the Series C. SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures and LG Technology Ventures joined, the company announced. That takes its total funding to roughly $185m. Zenity did not disclose a valuation. Tellingly, the new backers are all firms deploying agents in their own businesses.
Two Unit 8200 veterans, Ben Kliger and Michael Bargury, founded Zenity in 2021. Both previously built security products at Microsoft. It now has more than 230 staff, with research in Tel Aviv and its sales team in New York. Its customers, it says, are mostly Fortune 500 and Global 2000 firms in regulated industries.
Securing the agent, not the model
The pitch rests on a shift the industry is only now catching up to. A chatbot answers a question. An agent takes actions. It can reach internal databases, call tools, update records and run multi-step workflows across systems. That turns a content problem into a control problem.
