Sequoia Capital announced it has invested $30 million in Cymphony, valuing the startup at more than $100 million, to address new security risks from AI agents in enterprises. This follows a previously undisclosed seed investment from Sequoia.
The funding includes a $25 million Series A co-led by Sequoia and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund.
AI agents do not necessarily go through the same access and identity controls as employees, but they have access to multiple systems and handle large amounts of corporate data.
"Enterprise security was designed for human employees," said Shy Dekel, Cymphony co-founder and CEO. "More and more, there start to be independent entities that are practically joining the workforce, but they’re no longer people." Cymphony is trying to address that gap by giving security teams a single view of employees, AI agents, and other non-human identities, including the systems and sensitive data they can access.
At the core of its platform, the two-year-old startup has built what it calls a "workforce graph." This brings together identity, data, and activity signals. Cymphony says it is already finding those risks inside large companies.
At one U.S. public company, the startup said it found about 85,000 files that had become accessible to AI tools and agents.
Cymphony stated it helped close the exposure and verified that none of the files had been accessed through those AI systems.
In another case, Dekel told TechCrunch that an external collaborator had installed an unsanctioned instance of Anthropic’s Claude that used the collaborator’s existing access to scan thousands of sensitive files.
Beyond identifying risks, Cymphony uses AI agents to investigate incidents, prioritize what security teams should address, and automate some remediation, including correcting access permissions.
The platform can operate largely automatically, Dekel said, adding that customers can also opt for a managed service that brings Cymphony’s security experts into the loop for more complex cases.
Why Sequoia doubled down Sequoia’s initial bet on Cymphony came before the startup had settled on the problem it wanted to solve.
When the venture firm led its seed round more than two years ago, Cymphony had no product or even a clear product direction.
The investment was largely a bet on Dekel and his co-founders, all of whom came through Talpiot, the Israeli military’s highly selective technology and leadership program.
Sequoia was already familiar with the program through previous cybersecurity investments, including Wiz. "We just saw three amazing young people with the kind of pedigree that we at Sequoia have experienced a lot of success with," said Bogomil Balkansky, a Sequoia partner.
Nonetheless, Sequoia, Balkansky said, wanted to see more than the founders’ pedigree by the Series A. Cymphony had built a product, signed a double-digit number of enterprise customers, and reached seven figures in annual recurring revenue within its first year of sales.
Source: techcrunch
