AIR Emerges from Stealth with $50M to Secure AI Agent Supply Chains

AI security startup AIR has emerged from stealth after raising $50 million to address the security gaps in the growing software supply chain for AI agents, as TechCrunch first reported. The funding was secured across two seed rounds: a $10 million round led by Sequoia and a $40 million round led by Greenoaks.

As enterprises deploy autonomous agents, these tools increasingly rely on a nascent ecosystem of plugins, MCP servers, add-ons, and "skills" to interact with the internet and internal databases. AIR CEO Yair Saban and CTO Niv Hoffman—both veterans of Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence corps—argue that these components lack the rigorous oversight typical of modern operating system drivers. Saban told TechCrunch that without this governance, attackers could poison the content an agent consumes, creating significant operational risks.

AIR's platform provides three primary functions to combat these threats: 1. **Discovery:** Identifying active agents and employees using unapproved AI tools or personal accounts. 2. **Enforcement:** Intercepting and analyzing actions, such as fetching internet content or loading a skill. 3. **Vetting:** Checking tools against a proprietary whitelist. Saban stated that about 27% of the skills and add-ons AIR identifies online are currently filtered out.

Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch that the challenge is an "infrastructure problem" requiring continuous re-verification of every component an agent touches in real time.

AIR currently has about 40 employees and more than 20 customers, with roughly 25% being large enterprises. Saban reported the strongest demand from pharmaceutical companies and financial services. The company plans to use the new capital to expand go-to-market efforts in Europe and the U.S. and hire additional researchers. Other players in the space include Noma Security, Zenity, Astrix Security, and Operant AI.