Just by taking a quick look at the publicly available Crunchbase and PitchBook materials, it is possible to find that there are at least over twenty companies selling some form of AI agent security products. Some manufacturers review the tools used by agent, while others attempt to help enterprises control which data agent can access. There are also companies, such as CrowdStrike, that are building detection and response controls at the device level to make the terminals running agent on them more secure; others focus on detecting and resolving unauthorized AI usage.
Of course, these products are different from each other, but their commitments regarding the detection and management of agent are quite similar, involving knowledge graphs, continuous monitoring, runtime security, tool access, MCP review, and more.
Some companies are even updating their products to join this trend. Until last year, AI, a security startup known as Reco, mainly sold software for mapping and protecting SaaS and AI platforms. Today, it has shifted its focus to provide a broader range of solutions: by using context maps to connect agent with applications, personnel, accounts, and permissions, allowing security teams to see what agent can access and to revoke any unnecessary access rights.
Reco, co-founder and CEO, stated that the biggest change in driving the company's expansion of its business scope over the past year has been the speed at which the company has built and deployed AI agent. He mentioned that with one of the company's Fortune 100 clients, the Reco platform identified 21,000 agent that the companies themselves were not aware of. With another large financial services client, the startup claimed to have detected a agent set up by former employees, which could access Salesforce and shared data with a domain name that the company could not see.
In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, Klein stated: "The current market's demand for agent security is not merely related to agent itself; it pertains to the entire end-to-end ecosystem."
Klein is not the only one to emphasize the urgent need for companies to protect this expansion trend. HiddenLayer, a security startup, co-founder and CEO Chris Sestito, told me earlier this month that once agent enters the production environment, the scale of its costs and risks will quickly transition from a theoretical level to a “full-scale” situation. He also stated that more than 50 customers have already deployed AI agent in their production environments, reaching critical systems and sensitive assets.
Another AI startup, Cymphony, stated that in a US-listed company, it discovered that approximately 85,000 files had become accessible using AI tools and agent.
There is no doubt that investors are very interested in companies that can help enterprises identify and protect these agent. And Reco has already seized this opportunity: the company announced on Tuesday that it has raised $55 million in financing, which is an expansion on the $30 million Series B financing completed in February of this year. AT &T, as a client, participated in this round of expansion financing through its venture capital department, and Forestay as well as Quadrille Capital also took part in it.
Klein indicates that since the announcement of the company's second round of financing in February, the company's valuation has "more than doubled," but he did not disclose a specific figure, only vaguely estimating it to be in the "hundreds of millions of dollars" range. He also said that the company's current annual recurring revenue is in the "tens of millions of dollars" range and expects it to triple this year. The startup has over 100 customers, with financial services companies accounting for about 40% of its business.
On the surface, Reco's bet is that its existing coverage of SaaS applications and the increasingly provided AI and agent can help it stand out in competition. The company has currently integrated more than 280 applications, and Klein says that new integrations can be completed within a few days. He also mentioned that the platform uses browsers and network signals to identify those agent that are not directly connected to its applications, and it has the capability to check for trigger words and control tool calls.
The startup will use the new funds for recruitment, sales, partnerships, and customer support. Following this financing round, the cumulative total funding for Reco has reached $140 million.
