After research exposing vulnerabilities across millions of AI add-on installations, AIR launches an inline firewall for AI agents, protecting their context from external threats
NEW YORK CITY, NY / ACCESS Newswire / September 1, 2026 / AIR, the company building an inline firewall for agents, today emerged from stealth and announced $50 million in funding. The funding was led by Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks. Other participating investors included Swish Ventures and Netz Capital.
As enterprises deploy AI agents, they're connecting to more tools, data, and third-party services. They're also browsing websites, accessing files and emails, and taking actions on employees' behalf. This is becoming more complex as agents gain autonomy and connect to more of the enterprise. Malicious content or a compromised tool can influence an agent into taking unintended actions, creating a path to data theft, fraud, or unauthorized access. Unlike traditional software, agents make decisions based on the information they encounter, leaving security teams with limited visibility into what is influencing them, what they can access, and what actions they take.
AIR's launch follows a series of original security research findings that demonstrate the risk. In one study, Air found that more than 17,800 public AI add-ons - representing 6.7 million installations - relied on untrusted external instruction sources. In another, the company uncovered AI Skills in the wild impersonating trusted brands including Anthropic and OpenAI to bypass platform security reviews and execute arbitrary code.
"Every enterprise has a firewall protecting its network. Now they need one protecting their AI agents., AI agents need a new kind of firewall - one that protects what enters their context," said Yair Saban, co-founder and CEO of AIR. "Today, agents are autonomously installing tools, connecting to internal systems, and making decisions - and in most organizations, nobody knows what's running, what's trusted, or how to shut it off."
Founded by Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, AIR combines deep expertise in offensive security, enterprise infrastructure, and AI security research. The team is also joined by Ryan Knisley, former CISO at The Walt Disney Company and Costco Wholesale, as Chief Strategy Officer.
AIR continuously discovers and evaluates every skill, plugin, MCP server, and add-on across an organization's AI agent supply chain, before and after deployment. When an add-on is found to be malicious, vulnerable, or unapproved, AIR enables security teams to trace every agent and workflow that depends on it and revoke it across the organization. AIR also provides a marketplace of pre-vetted, certified add-ons, giving enterprises a safe path to expand agent capabilities without introducing unmanaged risk.
"What gave us conviction in AIR from the beginning was the founders," said Bogomil Balkansky, Partner at Sequoia Capital. "They saw early that AI agents would create a completely new security problem for enterprises and started building for it before most companies were even thinking about it. We believe they have the team and the vision to define this category."
"Software supply chains were never the most critical attack surface within an enterprise. Now, with AI agents, they are vitally important," said Patrick Backhouse, Partner at Greenoaks. "Agents operate at runtime, using skills, plugins, add-ons, and MCPs from sources that no security team has reviewed, and slipping past scanners built for yesterday's code. AIR is building the platform to discover every agent, govern what they are allowed to touch, and monitor them in production. We believe that this layer will become mandatory to enterprise cybersecurity, and we are proud to partner with Yair, Niv, and the Air team as they define it."
About AIR
AIR is the inline firewall for AI agents. It protects agents from malicious instructions, untrusted data, and compromised tools before they can influence an agent's decisions or actions. AIR gives enterprises the visibility and control to securely deploy and operate AI agents at scale. Learn more at air.security.
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SOURCE: AIR
View the original press release on ACCESS Newswire:
https://www.accessnewswire.com/newsroom/en/computers-technology-and-internet/air-emerges-from-stealth-with-50m-to-build-a-firewall-for-agents-1213313
