Neo Security, Inc.
Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners support former SentinelOne executives in building a real-time control layer to manage and secure AI for modern enterprises
Neo founding team
Neo founding team Shlomi Salem, Nick Warner and Eran Shirazi.
BOSTON, July 20, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Neo, the agentic software control company, emerged from stealth today with $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures. Built by former SentinelOne, Wiz and Palo Alto Networks veterans, Neo provides SecOps teams with inventory, status, mapping and policy control to manage enterprise-wide agent transformation and secure AI agents, AI-enabled applications, browsers, identities and traditional software with newly introduced agent capabilities. Neo will use the capital to rapidly scale its go-to-market and engineering teams as companies prioritize security initiatives to address rapid adoption of agent software.
“Enterprise security is designed for a world where software behaves predictably,” said Nick Warner, CEO and co-founder of Neo. “This world is changing rapidly. AI agents and agent capabilities are being embedded into browsers, developer tools, SaaS platforms and traditional applications, giving software the ability to reason, act, invoke tools and move through workflows with valid user permissions. Neo gives companies the real-time control layer they need to understand what agent software can do, manage their behavior and ensure adoption without slowing down business.”
With the introduction of agents, corporate environments are changing faster than traditional security programs can adapt. Threat surfaces change and mutate as employees adopt new AI tools from the ground up, while established software vendors add agent functionality to products already approved for enterprise use. As a result, SecOps teams must protect autonomous software running in approved business applications, often without the visibility and control necessary to govern their behavior. According to Gartner, in 2025 only 5% of enterprise applications will have agent functionality, but by the end of 2026 this will increase to 40%.
Neo closes this gap by introducing a real-time control layer for evolving software stacks, helping SecOps teams inventory the suite of tools running across the enterprise even as they add new agent capabilities, understand their changing capabilities and risks, assess whether they are securely configured, and enforce policies before risky activities occur.
“Enterprise software is becoming agents, changing how applications behave, how they are accessed and how work gets done,” said Zane Lackey, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Employees are rapidly deploying AI agents, and software vendors are integrating agent capabilities into products that companies already use. Companies need visibility into what that software does and the ability to control its behavior in real time. Nick, Shlomi, Eran, and the Neo team have already developed category-defining security platforms, and we believe they are uniquely positioned to build the layer of control that this new generation of enterprise software requires.”
Existing security architectures were designed for a different model of enterprise software, consisting of deterministic applications, human users, and known data movement paths. Agent systems behave differently. They can act independently, mimic user behavior, inherit permissions, chain tools, and move through workflows in ways that seem legitimate to security tools designed for previous eras of software. Securing this new model requires real-time visibility into human and non-human activity, mapping that assigns actions to the responsible user or agent, and granular policy enforcement within the software layer where agent activity occurs.
“As enterprise environments transform, Agentic AI is creating a new category of security largely comprised of software that can reason, act and invoke tools on its own,” said Elliott Robinson, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. “Neo combines a clear architectural view of governing this new software layer with a founding team that has already developed enterprise-grade security platforms at scale. This combination is important in a crowded market. Vision is important, but execution will determine the companies that define this next era of security, and Neo addresses one of the most difficult problems in agent security.”
The Neo platform offers five core features:
Neoverse-based software inventory: SecOps teams receive a complete inventory of AI agents, AI-enabled applications, plugins, extensions, MCP servers and traditional software that become agents, enriched by Neoverse, Neo’s constantly updated knowledge base on agent software features, risks and behaviors.
Capability and risk intelligence: Neo helps teams understand what agentic and non-agentic software can do, what it can access, and whether it is securely configured.
Real-time attribution: Each action creates an audit trail that maps the activity to the responsible human, agent, application, or identity.
Granular software control: Organizations can enforce group- or identity-specific policies for tool calls, API access, data movement, and agent workflows.
Native enforcement: Neo enforces controls natively, allowing organizations to block risky activities and malicious models and redirect out-of-bound prompts without leaving enforcement to another tool.
“AI is fundamentally changing the way software works in the enterprise and presents a whole new challenge for control and security,” said Michael Robinson, partner at Craft Ventures. “Neo is building the real-time control layer that enterprises need to understand, govern and secure agent software at scale. Nick, Shlomi and Eran bring the rare combination of industry vision, deep technical expertise and proven execution needed to define this market.”
Neo’s founders have extensive experience building and scaling industry-defining cybersecurity companies. CEO and co-founder Nick Warner designed and built the SentinelOne GTM organization and, as COO, took the company public in 2021. Nick has more than two decades of cybersecurity leadership experience, including other senior roles at Cylance, McAfee and Forcepoint. Co-founder Shlomi Salem previously led detection engineering at SentinelOne for more than a decade and co-led the internal threat research team, where he created threat actor profiles that supported the company’s entire security platform. Co-Founder Eran Shirazi previously co-founded customer experience company EasySend and led large enterprise-level research and development programs after years of leading the IDF’s Unit 8200 vulnerability research group.
To learn more about Neo Security, please visit www.neo.ai
About Neo
Neo is the agentic software control company built for modern AI-driven businesses. The Neo Platform gives SecOps teams the inventory, intelligence, mapping and policy control they need to govern agent software across AI agents, AI-enabled applications, browsers, identities and traditional software as enterprise applications become autonomous. Founded by SentinelOne veterans and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures, Neo enables companies to safely adopt AI while maintaining the visibility and control needed to manage risk across the enterprise. For more information, visit www.neo.ai
About Andreessen Horowitz
Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that supports bold entrepreneurs shaping the future through technology. We are stage agnostic: We invest seed capital to advance into growth-stage technology companies in bio + healthcare, consumer and enterprise applications, crypto, fintech, infrastructure and companies focused on American momentum. a16z manages over $90 billion across multiple funds.
About Bessemer Venture Partners
Bessemer Venture Partners helps entrepreneurs lay a strong foundation from the start to build long-term companies. With more than 155 IPOs and more than 450 portfolio companies across all industries, Bessemer supports founders and CEOs from inception through every stage of growth. Bessemer has backed industry-leading companies such as Anthropic, Abridge, Canva, LinkedIn, Perplexity, Pinterest, RocketLab, Shopify, ServiceTitan, Toast and Twilio and manages $20 billion in assets. Bessemer invests globally with investment teams in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, London, Bangalore and Tel Aviv. www.bvp.com
Media contact:
Will Clark
Marketbridge for Neo
Neo@marketbridge.com
A photo accompanying this announcement can be found at
https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/neo-launches-100m-secure-ai-113000705.html
