US-based Neo Secures $100 Million in Funding to Build an AI Agent Control Layer

en.Wedoany.com Reported - Neo announced it has raised $100 million in funding, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures. Founded by former executives from SentinelOne, Wiz, and Palo Alto Networks, the company is building a real-time control layer for agentic software within enterprises, aiming to address security challenges arising from the rapid proliferation of AI agents across browsers, developer tools, SaaS platforms, and legacy applications.

According to Gartner, only 5% of enterprise applications will have agentic capabilities in 2025, but this figure is expected to grow to 40% by the end of 2026. This shift means that software capable of reasoning, acting, invoking tools, orchestrating workflows, and inheriting user permissions is rapidly spreading within security environments originally built for deterministic applications and human users. Neo provides SecOps teams with an inventory of all AI agents and agent-enabled applications across the organization, enabling them to assess capabilities and risks, map operations to responsible users or agents, and enforce policies before risky activities occur.

CEO Nick Warner stated that enterprise security was originally built for a world where software behavior was predictable, and that world is changing rapidly. Warner previously designed go-to-market operations for SentinelOne and led the company's IPO in 2021. Earlier this year, Straiker raised $64 million for a similar agent security business; NewCore also raised $66 million to provide enterprise identities for AI agents, addressing the identity verification aspect of the same problem. The security challenge primarily stems from software that has been approved for use but gradually gains autonomous capabilities. Neo's platform covers AI agents, AI-enabled applications, browser extensions, MCP servers, plugins, and legacy software with agentic features, enabling native enforcement of controls to block risky tool invocations, API access, and data movement. Neo is betting that the larger market lies in the control layer, where the core issue is not the agent's identity, but what it is allowed to do. Through a $100 million seed round, a16z and Bessemer Venture Partners are betting that whoever builds this layer first will dominate the category.