Air raises $50M seed to build a firewall for AI agents
What's the deal? Air emerged from stealth on September 1, 2026, with $50 million in seed funding to build an inline firewall for AI agents. Sequoia Capital and Greenoaks co-led the round, joined by Swish VenturesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Netz, and angels including Wiz co-founder Yinon CosticaDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Clay co-founder Varun AnandDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Anne Neuberger.
What's the endgame? Air continuously discovers and evaluates every skill, plugin, MCP server, and add-on across an organisation's AI agent supply chain, before and after deployment. When one is found malicious, vulnerable, or unapproved, security teams can trace every workflow that depends on it and revoke it. The company also runs a marketplace of pre-vetted add-ons.
Why now? As enterprises deploy agents, those agents connect to more tools, browse websites, and act on employees' behalf — often autonomously. Malicious content or a compromised tool can push an agent into unintended actions, opening a path to data theft, fraud, or unauthorised access.
The proof: Air's launch follows its own research. In one study, it found more than 17,800 public AI add-ons — representing 6.7 million installations — relied on untrusted external instruction sources. In another, it uncovered AI Skills impersonating brands including AnthropicDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and OpenAI to bypass platform reviews and run arbitrary code.
Who's building it? Founded by Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, Air draws on offensive security, enterprise infrastructure, and AI security research. Ryan Knisley, former chief information security officer of The Walt Disney CompanyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Costco WholesaleDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, joins as chief strategy officer.
"AI agents need a new kind of firewall — one that protects what enters their context," said Saban, co-founder and chief executive officer. "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."
Investor view: "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," said Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia Capital. Greenoaks partner Patrick Backhouse added that agents use "skills, plugins, add-ons, and MCPs from sources that no security team has reviewed."
The signal: At $50 million, Air's seed round ranks in the top 1% of the 937 comparable US security seed rounds over the trailing 48 months. The size reflects investor conviction that agentic AI is opening a security gap that existing tools, built for static code, cannot cover.
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