Zenity is a leader in helping enterprises secure and govern AI agents. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Zenity CEO Ben Kliger to learn more about the company.
Ben Kliger’s Background
What is Ben Kliger’s background? Kliger said:
“I am someone who’s worked in cybersecurity for over 18 years, starting with my time in Unit 8200, the intelligence unit of the IDF. I have experience working in product management in various Executive and individual contributor roles. Of note, I also spent nearly 6 years as a security leader at Microsoft and, most recently, as the Co-Founder and CEO of Zenity since our inception in 2021. “
Formation Of Zenity
How did the idea for the company come together? Kliger shared:
“My co-founder, Michael Bargury, and I got connected while we were both working at Microsoft in the cloud security division. We immediately clicked and became good friends as we worked closely together. In our day-to-day work, we saw first-hand how frequently and broadly business enablement tools were being used by employees across the company to create apps, automation, and more, outside the purview of IT. We also saw the challenges the company was having internally in securing the resulting apps, automation, reports and bots; many of which contained access to internal sensitive data and were poorly configured. Michael and I saw around the corner and started Zenity as a way of enabling business users by bringing people closer to market-shifting technology, which has now evolved into Agentic AI”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Kliger reflected:
“There are far too many to count, but my favorite memories of working at Zenity is the day-to-day work that our team is putting forth to help our customers succeed in adopting AI Agents and low-code development. The celebrations, events, and milestones are important, but we are a company that is built on putting our customers and partners first. Everyone in the company believes wholeheartedly in our mission and in the importance of our work. As such, we all follow that mentality consistently and that is something that I truly relish. Seeing our team raise their game to meet the growing demand for our solutions is something that I truly love seeing every day.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Kliger explained:
“Since our founding, we have built the first application security platform solely focused on securing AI Agents that are carried by business users (a world with no-code to scan or CI/CD pipelines). Our agentless SaaS platform integrates directly with both AI Agent and low-code platforms to provide continuous monitoring, security posture management, and detection and response. Zenity provides cross-platform insights to our customers about what business users are both building and doing using powerful AI platforms that require neither developer skills nor coding knowledge to build and use powerful AI Agents and apps. We know that AI Agents are coming (recently named Gartner’s #1 strategic technology trend for 2025) and that enterprises need a way to enable their business users). It’s crazy to realize that existing tooling and processes are simply not purpose-built for this new wave of technology, which inherently leans on business users building and using AI Agents for a huge variety of use cases. The mind-blowing scale and nature of business-led development require a different approach. This is where Zenity comes in.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Kliger and the team faced in building the company? Kliger acknowledged:
“With how quickly our company has needed to grow and scale, hiring is always something that we are going to be diligent about, but that does present challenges. We have not (and will not) compromise on the types of people that we bring on to help us level up and take our business to where it’s going. This includes finding hyper-ambitious people who are builders at heart who are going to be additive to what we are doing today. This means we want to find people that are looking to shift the paradigm not only of our company, but of the industry and customers that we serve. Because we are at the infancy of the Agentic AI revolution, finding people that are adaptable, intellectually curious, but that also operate as part of a broader team mission and culture is a challenge we are continuously working to overcome.”
Evolution Of Zenity’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Kliger noted:
“Since starting the company 3 years ago, we have seen the rapid rise and adoption of AI across the enterprise. It’s not even something that enterprises can afford to not do, and it has resulted in the largest organizations leading from the front in adopting powerful enterprise copilots to arm their business users with AI capabilities and power regardless of technical ability. And you know what? Enterprise Copilots represent the same type of motion as low-code – it is the same theme – bringing people with no development skills closer to technology and enabling them to become modern, efficient professionals. We are experts in this space— having helped businesses unleash low-code platforms across the enterprise, and it is a natural evolution of the tech stack that we protect to now be a complete solution to govern and enable AI Agents. We continue to lead by being hyper-involved in the community, customers, and thought leaders, as well as doing our own security research, which we recently unveiled at BlackHat, where we showed how bad actors can take complete remote control over enterprise copilots (‘remote copilot execution’) and are already helping customers in securing against this by leveraging the Zenity AI Trust Layer.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Kliger cited:
“Since emerging from stealth, we have had many significant milestones. The first thing I’d like to point out is that we have already grown to be a 60-person company, with our R&D, engineering, and product residing in Israel and our go-to-market team in the United States. This growth has been led by customer adoption and market demand, and today, we boast many customers in the Fortune 100 that are using Zenity to reduce their risk and drive business enablement forward.”
“We also have been fortunate to partner with leading investors, including DTCP and Third Point Ventures, who led our recent Series B, as well as Intel Capital, who led our Series A round of investment in October of 2023, and Microsoft themselves, who led a strategic investment in July of this year. The Microsoft investment is of particular note, given that they are the world’s largest provider of Agentic AI and low-code development software and partnered with Zenity to accelerate a joint go-to-market strategy to enhance the security and success of our mutual customers. From a technology standpoint, we have stayed at the forefront of innovation by being first to market with supporting AI Agent and low-code adoption across a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Power Platform, Fabric, Copilot Studio, Copilot for M365, Salesforce, Salesforce Einstein, ServiceNow, Workato, Zapier, and more.”
“We are also proud to have been featured as speakers and researchers at many major security conferences, including BlackHat (2024, 2023, 2022), RSA (2024, 2023), OWASP Global AppSec, and many more. With Zenity as the primary supporter, there was a recently launched Gen AI Attacks Matrix, based on some of the great work from MITRE, and OWASP also launched a dedicated Top 10 project for low-code/no-code security, which was released in January of 2023 and continues to be updated and modified today.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Kliger about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“In our single largest deployment, we help a Fortune 100 Technology firm manage upwards of 1 million individual agents, apps, copilots, bots, and automation. After a speedy deployment, this company was able to identify 90,000 security vulnerabilities and mitigate 80,000 of them within 3 months of deployment. These risks stemmed from a variety of misconfigurations, risky default settings that business users did not adapt while building their own apps and copilots, and guest users having unmitigated privileged access to internal resources and sensitive data.”
Funding
When asking Kliger about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“In our most recent round of funding, DTCP and Third Point Ventruesled our Series B, with a $38 million total investment. We also had a strategic investment come in from M12, Microsoft’s Venture Arm, in July of 2024.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Kliger affirmed:
“We are the only company focused on bringing an Application Security approach to AI Agents, and we are doing so with an agentless solution. We provide continuous, real-time visibility throughout the enterprise to see exactly how people are using AI Agents and what they are building that evades the purview of the AppSec team. Then, we run each individual agent, application, and interaction through our risk engine to determine how those risks have an effect on the business, understand business logic and use, and map vulnerabilities to popular security frameworks like OWASP Top 10 and MITRE and layering in Detection & Response capabilities. We are also able to provide customers with preventative policies and playbooks that enforce continuous governance and secure adoption of these tools; providing security teams with silent remediation capabilities that reduce risk behind the scenes before they reach the light of day.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Kliger concluded:
“We are aiming to continue our growth trajectory and help the world’s leading enterprises fully unleash the power of Agentic AI. We will do so by continuing our work in the community, deeply understanding and feeling the pain of our customers, and working with our partners to help deliver meaningful solutions and impact. We also are continuing to strengthen our relationships with technology providers themselves, and continuing to provide mature solutions to meet the growing (urgent) demand that businesses are clamoring to place the power of Agentic AI into the hands of all business users.”
