AIR raises $50M to help vet the skills AI agents use

AI security startup AIR is coming out of stealth with $50 million raised across two seed rounds, aiming to help companies monitor the nascent software supply chain forming around the skills, plug-ins, MCP servers, and other add-ons that AI agents use to interact with the internet. Founded by Yair Saban (CEO) and Niv Hoffman (CTO), veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence corps, AIR offers a platform that discovers agents running inside companies, continuously vets the skills, tools, and components those agents use, and blocks them from interacting with software or external sources that don’t pass security criteria; it also offers a marketplace of vetted add-ons and skills.

The two rounds closed within weeks of each other, Saban told TechCrunch: the first raised $10 million, led by Sequoia, and the second $40 million, led by Greenoaks, with participation from Swish, Netz, and several other angel investors. “In the early 2000s, whenever you installed a driver, the driver didn’t need to be signed. Today, every time you install a driver, you see a signature saying who signed it, because the driver is actually loading code into the kernel,” Saban said. “You don’t have that with skills or plug-ins or MCPs, and it’s a shame, because it’s the same mechanism, it’s the same lesson, but we haven’t learned it.”

Saban says AIR maintains a whitelist by continuously evaluating skills and add-ons available online for changes and malicious behavior, since a previously approved skill can turn risky if a package it downloads changes or its developer’s account is compromised; he said AIR’s platform currently filters out about 27% of the add-ons and skills it finds online. AIR claims more than 20 customers, roughly a quarter of them large enterprises, with the strongest demand so far in heavily regulated industries, particularly financial services and pharmaceuticals.

AIR is far from alone in the category: rivals Noma Security, Zenity, Astrix Security, and Operant AI all offer overlapping discovery, access-control, or governance tools for AI agents and MCP servers, and venture money is flowing into the space — Zenity raised a $125 million Series C in August, and Noma raised a $100 million Series B last year. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky argues that continuously re-verifying every skill, plug-in, MCP server, and sub-agent an enterprise’s agents touch is fundamentally an infrastructure problem, not just a security one, and that AIR has spent the past year building that pipeline. AIR currently has around 40 employees, and Saban said the new capital will mainly go toward hiring researchers and expanding go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and Europe.

Why it matters

As companies hand AI agents growing access to internal systems, unvetted skills and MCP servers become a new supply-chain attack surface — and AIR is betting the market will pay for continuous verification the way it once paid for signed software drivers.