Neo has emerged from stealth with $100 million in funding to build security and control infrastructure for agentic software. Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures.
The Boston-based company was founded by cybersecurity executives with experience at SentinelOne, Wiz and Palo Alto Networks. Neo plans to use the funding to rapidly expand its engineering and go-to-market teams as enterprises adopt more AI agents and AI-enabled applications.
Neo describes itself as an Agentic Software Control company. Its platform gives security operations teams visibility and policy controls across AI agents, AI-enabled applications, browsers, identities, plugins, extensions and traditional software that is gaining autonomous capabilities.
Agentic software can reason, invoke tools and execute multistep workflows using valid user permissions. These abilities can improve productivity, but they also allow applications to access data and take actions in ways that conventional security systems may struggle to identify or govern.
Neo is targeting this security gap with a real-time control layer that monitors how agentic software behaves. The platform helps companies identify which tools are operating across their environments, understand what those tools can access and enforce policies before risky actions occur.
The opportunity is growing as AI capabilities are added to software already approved for enterprise use. Citing Gartner, Neo said agentic capabilities were included in only 5% of enterprise applications in 2025, but that figure is expected to reach 40% by the end of 2026.
Neo’s platform provides five primary capabilities covering software inventory, risk intelligence, attribution, policy enforcement and native control. These functions are designed to help security teams manage both employee-adopted AI tools and agentic features introduced by established software providers.
Its software inventory is powered by Neoverse, a continuously updated knowledge base covering the capabilities, risks and behavior of agentic software. The inventory includes AI agents, applications, plugins, browser extensions, Model Context Protocol servers and conventional software becoming more autonomous.
Neo’s capability and risk intelligence tools assess what each application can do, which systems or data it can access and whether it has been configured safely. Security teams can use this information to identify tools that have excessive permissions or capabilities inconsistent with company policies.
The platform also creates an audit trail for each action and attributes activity to the responsible human, agent, application or identity. This is intended to help security teams determine who or what initiated an action even when several AI agents and software tools are involved in the same workflow.
Organizations can establish policies governing tool calls, application programming interface access, data movement and agentic workflows. These controls can be customized for specific groups or identities based on their roles and permissions.
Neo’s native enforcement capabilities allow the platform to block risky activity and malicious models directly. It can also redirect prompts that fall outside approved boundaries without transferring the enforcement action to another security product.
The company was co-founded by CEO Nick Warner, Shlomi Salem and Eran Shirazi. Warner previously built SentinelOne’s go-to-market organization and served as chief operating officer when the cybersecurity company went public in 2021.
Salem spent more than a decade leading detection engineering and threat research activities at SentinelOne. Shirazi previously co-founded EasySend and led vulnerability research within Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces.
Neo believes existing cybersecurity architectures were built around predictable applications, human users and established paths of data movement. Its platform is intended for environments where autonomous software can mimic user behavior, inherit permissions and move between applications while appearing legitimate to traditional security tools.
KEY QUOTES:
“Enterprise security was built for a world where software behaved predictably. That world is changing fast. AI agents and agentic 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 enterprises the real-time control layer they need to understand what agentic software can do, govern how it behaves, and secure adoption without slowing down the business.”
Nick Warner, CEO and Co-Founder of Neo
“Enterprise software is becoming agentic, changing how applications behave, what they can access, and how work gets done. Employees are rapidly adopting AI agents and software vendors are embedding agentic capabilities into products enterprises already use. Organizations need visibility into what this software can do and the ability to govern its behavior in real time. Nick, Shlomi, Eran, and the Neo team have built category-defining security platforms before, and we believe they’re uniquely positioned to build the control layer this new generation of enterprise software requires.”
Zane Lackey, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
“Agentic AI is creating a new security category as enterprise environments transform, becoming largely composed of software that can reason, act, and invoke tools on its own. Neo combines a clear architectural view of how to control this new software layer with a founding team that has built enterprise-grade security platforms at scale before. That combination matters in a crowded market. Vision is important, but execution will determine the companies that define this next era of security, and Neo is tackling one of agentic security’s hardest problems.”
Elliott Robinson, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
“AI is fundamentally changing how software operates inside the enterprise, creating an entirely new control and security challenge. Neo is building the real-time control layer enterprises need to understand, govern, and secure agentic software at scale. Nick, Shlomi, and Eran bring the rare combination of category vision, deep technical expertise, and proven execution required to define this market.”
Michael Robinson, Partner at Craft Ventures
