More Updates to Guardians of the Machine Age
20 new AI Security companies
As of last night IT-Harvest, the next-gen industry analysis firm, tracks 506 AI Security vendors. These are all founded in recent years to either protect AI deployments or use AI for advancing security capabilities; things like SOC Automation, Vulnerability Management and Email Security.
This post is a fulfillment of a promise made in the front matter of Guardians of the Machine Age: How AI Security Will Define the Future of Digital Defense to update the coverage of new vendors as they are discovered here on Substack.
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Ten vendors founded in 2026.
Here are twenty more vendors added to dashboard.it-harvest.com since the book went to the printer on March 6, 2026. Subscribers have access to these and complete data on 4,130 cybersecurity vendors. The following was written mostly by Claude Cowork using our IT-Harvest Dashboard skill.
20 New AI Security Vendors to Watch
Twenty newly tracked companies in the IT-Harvest Dashboard, all building at the intersection of AI and security — from AI governance and agent authority to autonomous SOC operations, AI firewalls, and agentic email defense.
1. Neon Cyber
Governance · neoncyber.com
An AI-native browser security platform that secures the workforce where modern work actually happens — in the browser. Neon Cyber gives security, IT, and risk teams full visibility into how employees use generative-AI and SaaS tools, detects shadow AI, stops sensitive-data leakage, blocks AI-powered phishing, and enforces governance in real time, all through a lightweight extension that never blocks productivity. Based in Fort Worth, Texas, Neon Cyber was founded in 2024 by Cody Pierce and Mark St. John (who previously co-founded AlphaWave) and is backed by seed investor Silverton Partners.
2. Cinchy
Governance · cinchy.com
Maker of PeriMind, an enterprise control plane and registry for AI actions. Cinchy secures, governs, and audits every interaction between AI agents and an organization’s systems, data, and applications — enforcing policy at runtime and producing compliance-ready audit trails. The premise: AI doesn’t create enterprise risk until it takes an action, and PeriMind governs every one of those actions. Based in Toronto, Cinchy was co-founded in 2014 by Karanjot Jaswal and has raised more than $30M CAD from investors including Forgepoint Capital, IVP, BDC, and ScaleUP Ventures.
3. Praegis
Governance · praegis.ai
An AI-powered, preemptive cybersecurity platform built for the AI-enabled workplace. Praegis combines AI-driven ransomware protection, endpoint security, and Zero-Trust defense to stop modern threats before they execute. Based in Malibu, California, Praegis is an early-stage venture launched in 2025. It’s three cofounders are Darren Newell, CEO, Patrick Wood, COO, and Mary Mondragon, CRO.
4. Ocean
Email Security · ocean.security
An agentic email security platform that recently emerged from stealth with $28M. Ocean’s AI agents investigate every email the way a seasoned analyst would — understanding intent and enriching context — to stop targeted phishing, business email compromise, financial fraud, and AI-powered attacks that surface-level tools miss. It also auto-triages the SOC queue and guides employees in real time. Based in New York and Tel Aviv, Ocean was founded in 2024 by Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal, and its $28M raise was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners (with Picture Capital and Cerca Partners), alongside angels including Wiz’s Assaf Rappaport and Armis’s Nadir Izrael and Yevgeny Dibrov.
5. NeoXFortress
Governance · www.neoxfortress.com
Builder of Agent Authority Infrastructure™ — runtime authority, approval, and tamper-evident evidence for AI agents operating in high-trust environments. NeoXFortress lets organizations grant agents the authority to act while keeping a verifiable record of what they did and why. Based in Washington, DC, NeoXFortress was founded by Julio Berroa.
6. VigilBase
SOC Automation · vigilbase.com
An agentic cybersecurity provider and managed security service that augments lean security teams: its AI agents handle triage while human analysts handle the rest. VigilBase offers Flarehawk threat intelligence, the Shield managed WAF and edge protection (as a Cloudflare Enterprise partner), and 24/7 incident response, citing a sub-four-minute median response time across 200+ customers. Based in Dubai, VigilBase operates as a managed security services provider. Founded by Ilyas Esmail.
7. Verosek
AI Firewall · www.verosek.com
An AI + MCP gateway with security built in — a single layer between an organization’s apps and every AI agent. Verosek routes LLM calls to any provider, executes MCP tools with per-key access control, and scans every request, response, and tool output for prompt injection, PII, and topic drift via its Shield engine (24 checks). Every decision is signed and auditable with tamper-evident receipts, and it drops in as a replacement for the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini SDKs. Based in Mumbai, India, Verosek was founded in 2025 by CEO Vats Shah and is currently bootstrapped.
8. AquilaI
SOC Automation · aquilai.io
A unified threat-management platform to assess, prioritize, monitor, and prevent cyber threats from a single console. AquilaI spans Breach & Attack Simulation (BAS) for automated threat validation, digital-risk monitoring, and email protection, anchored by AISOC — an AI-powered Security Operations Center delivering real-time threat detection and automated incident response. Based in Mumbai, India, Aquila I was founded in 2020 by Hakimuddin Wadlawala.
9. Beacon Security
SOC Automation · beacon.security
Builder of an “agentic data layer” for the modern SOC. Beacon sits between telemetry sources and downstream tools to collect, normalize, enrich, and route security data at scale, embedding AI across the pipeline. Customers see roughly a 60% reduction in SIEM ingestion volume (up to 98% for high-volume cloud sources) without sacrificing detection fidelity, plus in-stream detection of sensitive data such as PII, credentials, and secrets. Built within the Team8 venture group, Beacon was co-founded by CEO Gal Tal-Hochberg (former Team8 Group CTO) with Iddo Israely and Or Mattatia, drawing on a team from Israeli Unit 8200, Sygnia, and Mitiga.
10. Cantina
SOC Automation · www.cantina.security
A community-driven, agentic “security operating system.” Cantina deploys autonomous agents — for application security, network operations, security operations, and AI-agent security — that detect, prioritize, remediate, and verify threats across the whole stack, closing every loop from first discovery to verified fix. The result: lean teams operate with the coverage of a security organization ten times their size. Based in New York and formerly known as Spearbit, Cantina is led by co-founder and CEO Harikrishnan “Hari” Mulackal and is backed by investors including Framework Ventures, 1kx, Nascent, Volt Capital, and Robot Ventures.
11. CounterShadow
SOC Automation · countershadow.com
Maker of AMI (Autonomous Machine Intelligence), an autonomous AI SOC analyst that reasons like a seasoned human — no playbooks required. AMI ingests alerts, plans its own investigation, gathers evidence, reaches a benign/malicious verdict, and orchestrates response at machine speed. It connects to 100+ tools, scales across parallel investigations, and keeps full, human-readable audit trails; deployable in cloud, on-prem, offline, or private cloud. Based in London, CounterShadow was founded by CEO Jonathan Zulberg and CTO Tony Massé and has closed an undisclosed first investment round.
12. Cylerian
SOC Automation · cylerian.com
An AI-native platform that unifies IT operations and security in a single agent and cloud platform. Cylerian brings together security (next-gen SIEM, EDR, XDR, SOAR, threat hunting, DLP), observability, and operations, letting teams query infrastructure in natural language and automate cross-domain workflows. It is designed for MSPs, MSSPs, and cost-conscious enterprises consolidating their stack. Based in Jersey City, New Jersey (with an office in Panama City, Panama), Cylerian was founded by CEO Vijay Akasapu, a founding member of Mandiant.
13. HarkX
SOC Automation · harkx.ai
An autonomous AI SOC platform that embeds AI agents directly into security operations to cut through alert noise, automate investigations, and strengthen response. HarkX offers a unified alert center, context-rich incident intelligence, and MITRE ATT&CK mapping, integrating across EDR/XDR, SIEM, cloud, SOAR, and ticketing tools — and cites roughly an 80% reduction in investigation time. Based in Bengaluru, India, HarkX was co-founded by CEO Sasikumar Ganesan.
14. Joon
SOC Automation · joon.co
An AI-native SecOps platform that turns security operations into a continuous, self-improving defense system. Joon fields a team of AI agents — Detection Engineer, SOC Analyst, Security Validation, and Threat Hunter — that operate inside the tools a customer already has to prepare, validate, detect, and respond at machine speed, eliminating detection drift and reducing toil without linear cost growth. Based in Tel Aviv, Joon was founded in 2025 by a team that includes Siemplify co-founder Alon Cohen (Siemplify was acquired by Google) and veterans of Google’s SecOps team, and has raised about $6M.
15. Kai Security
SOC Automation · www.kai.security
An agentic AI autonomous-defense platform that executes security work end-to-end — threat intelligence, exposure and vulnerability management, detection engineering, and response — as one unified pipeline at machine speed with expert-level accuracy. Kai cites outcomes such as triaging 15 million vulnerabilities in 10 hours, positioning itself as a reasoning layer that sits above (and replaces) the fragmented security stack. Based in San Jose, California, Kai was founded in 2025 by Galina Antova (co-founder of Claroty) and Dr. Damiano Bolzoni (co-founder of SecurityMatters) and emerged from stealth with $125M led by Evolution Equity Partners, with participation from N47.
16. Louie AI
SOC Automation · louie.ai
Built by Graphistry, Louie.ai is an agentic investigation and AI-automation platform (“connect, vibe, AI automate”) that brings teams and their data into the era of agentic investigation. It integrates with Splunk, Databricks, and Graphistry, automates detection and response, and adds powerful graph visualization for threat hunting. Louie was the first AI to speed-run Splunk’s annual analyst competition and won a U.S. Cyber Command alert-volume reduction challenge. Based in San Francisco, Louie.ai comes from founder Leo Meyerovich’s Graphistry — a UC Berkeley spinout backed by investors including In-Q-Tel, BASF Venture Capital, and Greylock.
17. Mars Security
SOC Automation · marssec.ai
Mars continuously converts threat intelligence into executable hunts and detections across an organization’s existing security stack — with no data ingestion and no tool replacement — so every organization can hunt threats 24/7 at scale. Based in Tel Aviv, Mars Security was founded by CEO Shahaf Galili and CTO Ran Lerer and emerged from stealth with $8.5M in seed funding.
18. Rilian
SOC Automation · www.rilian.com
An agentic security platform built by practitioners for sovereign, critical-infrastructure, and defense environments. Its Caspian platform orchestrates the entire security stack through one agentic interface while capturing the tradecraft of an organization’s best analysts; DawnTreader is an autonomous deployment and compliance engine for air-gapped and sovereign environments; and Armory is a curated, pre-vetted ecosystem of commercial and government off-the-shelf security tools. Based in McLean, Virginia, Rilian was founded in 2024 by Christian Schnedler, Nick Pompeo, and Dan Fischer and has raised $28M — including a $17.5M seed led by 8VC, First In, and Tamarack Global, with 8090 Industries, Liquid 2 Ventures, Perot Jain, and Protego Ventures.
19. SecsphereSOC
SOC Automation · secsphere.straightarc.com
SecSphere SOC, from StraightArc Technologies, is an AI-native SIEM, XDR, and SOC platform that bundles 6,000+ detection rules with SOAR, UEBA, NDR, threat intelligence, and compliance automation in a single platform — and offers a Free Edition that’s free forever. Based in Udaipur, India, StraightArc Technologies was founded by cybersecurity veteran and digital-forensics author Komal Prince Boonlia.
20. Cyber Triage
SOC Automation · www.cybertriage.com
An automated Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) platform for SOCs, MSSPs, DFIR teams, and law enforcement. Cyber Triage agentlessly collects and normalizes host artifacts, imports EDR telemetry, and automatically scores bad and suspicious items so responders can answer intrusion questions — malware, ransomware, account takeover — in minutes, with new AI-assisted investigations via an MCP integration. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, Cyber Triage is made by Sleuth Kit Labs — founded and led by Dr. Brian Carrier (creator of Autopsy and The Sleuth Kit) after spinning out of Basis Technology in 2023, and bootstrapped to date. Trusted by the U.S. Army, NATO, and Deloitte.20 New AI Security Vendors to Watch
That’s it so far. There are 58 more to go to catch up with our backlog, so stay tuned!