Analysis
The startup says 60% of the risks it finds come from apps built by non-developers using AI coding tools — finance departments lead the pack.
The race to secure autonomous agents infiltrating corporate networks has a new entrant with a significant war chest. Pluto Security, a startup focused on the runtime behavior of AI tools, announced it has raised $42 million in total funding. The capital stack includes an $8.5 million seed investment led by TLV Partners and a $34 million Series A led by Jump Capital. The round also saw participation from Skinos — the venture firm founded by Check Point co-founder Shlomo Kramer — alongside Ansa Capital and various angel investors. While some reports initially pegged the Series A at $33 million, the company confirms the $34 million figure.
Founded by CEO Shahar Bahat, the company has been selling its platform since April 2026. In that period, the startup reports it has reached $2 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a figure that remains vendor-reported. The company claims to have more than 30 enterprise customers, including names like Oscar Health, Workato, Sixt, and AlphaSense. These figures emerge as security startups scramble to address the risks posed by AI agents that can execute tasks, access data, and interact with other software without constant human oversight.
At its core, Pluto Security monitors the AI tools employees bring into the workplace, including the various skills, extensions, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers these tools rely on. The platform identifies risky components and enforces security policies across agents deployed within an organization. According to Bahat, a new AI tool can appear inside a company’s environment within two hours of its public release, creating a narrow window for IT departments to catch up.
The company’s approach to mitigation is active. Rather than simply flagging a problem, Pluto claims it can perform real-time intervention. This involves injecting context back into an agent’s session, effectively forcing the agent to pause and ask for human confirmation before proceeding with a potentially dangerous action. Bahat describes this as a shift from monitoring user behavior to monitoring agent behavior, a distinction that defines the company’s current market positioning.
One of the more striking claims from the company involves where these risks originate. Pluto reports that 60% of the risks it detects across its customer base are found in tools that are essentially “vibe-coded” — a term Bahat uses to describe applications built using AI-assisted coding tools by people who are not software developers. Finance departments are the primary source of these risks, followed by marketing and legal teams. Developers, perhaps surprisingly, rank fourth. This suggests that the biggest security gaps are not necessarily coming from sophisticated engineering projects, but from everyday business units experimenting with AI tools to streamline their own workflows.
The reality of these risks appears to be significant, at least according to the company’s internal data. During proof-of-concept (POC) deployments, Bahat claims the company has not once failed to find malicious activity. In some cases, these POCs uncovered active, live attacks involving compromised extension packages or malicious skills already operating within the client’s environment. As with all vendor-reported success stories, these findings represent a specific slice of the company’s experience rather than a broad industry benchmark.
To understand where Pluto fits, it helps to distinguish between two layers of the same security problem. Companies like Okta and SailPoint are building out the identity layer, focusing on “Agent SSO” and identity governance to manage which agents are allowed to access specific corporate resources. Pluto, along with other recent entrants like Rein, operates at the runtime enforcement layer. While identity tools decide who gets in, runtime tools watch what those agents actually do once they are inside the system.
This distinction is becoming a standard way to categorize the market. Pluto’s strategy is bolstered by its free platform, Plutonium, which launched in April 2026. The tool allows companies to scan for risks in publicly available AI skills and connectors. The company reports that 70% of its sales pipeline is driven by inbound interest generated by this free scanner, suggesting that many enterprises are actively looking for ways to audit the AI components their employees are already using.
Pluto’s $42 million raise places it firmly in the same agent-security funding lane as other recent high-profile deals. This includes HiddenLayer, which secured a $100 million Series B in early September, and Rein, which raised $25 million in October. The industry is coalescing around the idea that agent security is a standalone category rather than just a feature of existing software. Pluto is using its new capital to fund product development, expand its security research, and grow its presence in the U.S. market. With 40 employees split between the U.S. and Israel, the company is betting that the rapid proliferation of AI agents will make runtime monitoring a non-negotiable part of the enterprise security stack, though the long-term efficacy of these tools against evolving threats remains a subject for ongoing evaluation.
Dana Ellison works for Forkast.
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