AIR Raises $50M to Help Companies Vet Skills and Add-Ons Used by AI Agents

As organizations increasingly grant AI agents access to their internal systems, a new software supply chain is emerging around the tools these agents rely on: skills, plugins, MCP servers, and add-ons that enable internet interaction.

AI security startup AIR argues that companies need a way to monitor this supply chain, and it is now exiting stealth mode with $50 million raised across two seed rounds to build the necessary product.

Founded by Yair Saban (CEO) and Niv Hoffman (CTO), veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 intelligence corps specializing in offensive cybersecurity, AIR provides a platform that discovers agents operating within companies, continuously vets the skills, tools, and components they use, and blocks interactions with software or external sources that fail security checks. The platform also offers a marketplace of pre-vetted add-ons and skills for AI agents.

The funding rounds closed within weeks of each other, Saban told TechCrunch, with the first round raising $10 million and the second $40 million. Sequoia led the first round, while Greenoaks led the second, Saban said. Swish, Netz, and Zach Frankel (president of Cognition), Yinon Costica (co-founder of Wiz), Ofir Erlich (co-founder of Eon), Anne Neuberger, Omer Adam, Varun Anand (co-founder of Clay), and other angel investors also participated.

AIR’s core argument is that the widespread adoption of AI agents in companies is beginning to resemble operating systems, yet the tools they use or install are not subject to the same oversight applied to drivers or applications.

“In the early 2000s, installing a driver did not require a signature. Today, every driver installation displays a signature indicating who signed it, because the driver loads code into the kernel,” Saban said. “You do not have that with skills, plugins, or MCPs, and it’s a shame, because it’s the same mechanism and lesson, but we haven’t learned it.”

The primary risk, he argues, is that as AI agents operate more autonomously across databases, enterprise systems, and the internet, attackers can poison the content consumed by AI agents rather than attacking them directly.

The startup claims it solves this with a visibility product that identifies active agents across a company’s environment, as well as employees using unapproved AI tools or personal accounts. It then uses an enforcement layer to hook into agents, intercepting and analyzing actions such as loading a skill or fetching internet content. Finally, AIR checks the tools, add-ons, or software an agent intends to use against a whitelist maintained by the startup.

Saban explains that the startup maintains this whitelist by openly evaluating skills and add-ons available on the internet for changes or malicious behavior, noting that a previously approved skill could become risky if a downloaded package changes or its developer’s account is compromised. He added that AIR’s platform currently filters out about 27% of the add-ons and skills it discovers online.

AIR claims to have more than 20 customers, with Saban stating that roughly a quarter are large enterprises. He noted that the company has seen the strongest demand in heavily regulated industries, particularly financial services and pharmaceuticals.

However, AIR is not alone in this space. Noma Security offers discovery, access controls, and runtime monitoring for agents, MCP servers, and skills, while Zenity provides security and governance tools with similar functions. Astrix Security’s identity platform also enables companies to discover and control agents and MCP servers, and Operant AI offers agent protections along with an MCP gateway.

Significant venture capital is also chasing this category. Zenity raised a $125 million Series C in August, while Noma raised a $100 million Series B last year.

Saban believes AIR’s competitive advantage lies in its ability to continuously vet the ecosystem of skills and add-ons surrounding AI agents. “Continuously vetting skills and plugin websites is a difficult mission. Gaining visibility over the endpoint is easy; everyone will do that. It’s hard to create a moat around that,” he said.

While the CEO acknowledged that AI labs and providers will eventually integrate security checks and policies to filter out malicious skill and tool usage, he believes companies will still prefer purchasing an independent product that works across multiple vendors.

“This is not a scanning problem; it is a continuous re-verification problem,” Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia, told TechCrunch in an emailed statement. “Inspecting every skill, plugin, MCP server, and sub-agent an enterprise’s agents touch, re-inspecting each one every time it changes, in real time and across an entire company’s agent fleet, is an infrastructure problem long before it is a security problem. Air has spent the last year building that pipeline. You do not catch up to it by writing a better scanner.”

AIR currently has around 40 employees. Saban said the new capital will primarily be used to hire researchers and expand the company’s go-to-market efforts in the U.S. and Europe.