Ex-SentinelOne raises $100M to police

Neo emerged from stealth July 20 with $100 million in total funding: a fresh $75 million Series A, with Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners as the anchor backers and Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures also writing checks, stacked on top of a previously undisclosed $25 million seed round closed in 2025. The startup’s pitch is a live monitoring and enforcement system that sits between AI agents and the enterprise systems they touch, inventorying which autonomous systems exist, what data and permissions they can reach, and applying security policy against agents, browser extensions, and traditional programs that have picked up autonomous features.

The founding team’s pedigree is the pitch. CEO Nick Warner built SentinelOne’s go-to-market organization and served as its COO through the company’s 2021 IPO, after earlier stints at Cylance, McAfee, and Forcepoint. Chief product officer Shlomi Salem led SentinelOne’s detection engineering for more than a decade. Co-founder Eran Shirazi previously led vulnerability research inside Unit 8200 and co-founded EasySend. Their framing is that today’s identity and endpoint tools were built for humans and static software, not for agents that act autonomously under real employee credentials.

What it means for operators

Neo lands in the same problem space as Hugging Face’s agent-driven breach, where the entry point was exactly the kind of automated, credentialed process traditional security tooling wasn’t watching. Whether or not you buy Neo specifically, the underlying question is now unavoidable for any team running agents against production systems: can you list every agent with standing access to your data today, and would you know if one started acting outside its intended scope? If the honest answer is no, that’s the gap this entire funding wave is racing to fill.