Straiker, the agentic security company founded in March 2025, announced a $64 million Series A on June 29, bringing its total funding to $85 million. The round was led by Marathon and included Illuminate Financial. The company says it secures every AI agent that enterprises build or deploy — covering the full lifecycle from inventory and pre-deployment testing through runtime protection.

A new attack surface demands a new kind of security

Traditional application security was designed for software that waits for instructions and returns a result. AI agents are different: they plan multi-step tasks, call external tools, browse the web, execute code, and take actions with real-world consequences across systems. That autonomy creates attack vectors that existing security tooling was not built to handle.

Prompt injection — in which malicious content in an agent's environment redirects its behavior — is among the most prevalent threats. Goal hijacking, tool misuse, and credential exfiltration round out the attack surface. Straiker's platform is purpose-built for these patterns, using adversarial agents to probe enterprise deployments the way real attackers would.

Three-layer defense across the agent lifecycle

Straiker ships three products that map to the stages at which agents can be compromised:

Discover AI inventories every AI agent and Model Context Protocol (MCP) server running inside an enterprise environment, giving security teams visibility into what agents exist before they worry about whether those agents are secure.

Ascend AI is Straiker's adversarial testing engine. It runs automated red-team campaigns against agents before they reach production, testing for prompt injection, goal hijacking, and tool misuse using threat data developed by Straiker's STAR Labs research division. STAR Labs works directly with frontier AI labs, giving Straiker early visibility into emerging attack techniques.

Defend AI operates at runtime, providing real-time guardrails and full-chain forensics across live agent workflows. Together, the three products are designed to catch threats at whichever point in the deployment lifecycle they surface.

The funding and what comes next

Straiker raised a $21 million seed round in late 2025 and has scaled rapidly since. The company was named to the CB Insights list of the 100 most innovative AI startups of 2026 and won Best AI Security Testing Platform at The Hacker News Cybersecurity Stars Awards 2026. The $64 million Series A will go toward expanding GPU infrastructure, developing specialized security models, and funding STAR Labs research. Straiker CEO and co-founder Ankur Shah has positioned the company as the security layer that enterprises will need as they expand from experimental agent deployments to production workloads where agent failures have real operational and reputational costs.