As companies begin to deploy AI agents en masse, terms like “AI sprawl” have become commonplace in technology social media and thought leadership. But CISOs worried about the security of swarms of agents suddenly operating across their networks may find themselves dealing with a new kind of sprawl, with vendors offering to help.
A quick look at public profiles on Crunchbase and PitchBook reveals at least two dozen companies selling some form of AI agent security. Some vendors are scrutinizing the tools agents use, while others are looking to help businesses control the data their agents can access. Some companies, such as CrowdStrike, are building detection and response controls on devices where agents run them, while others are focused on discovering and resolving unauthorized AI use.
Of course, these products are different, but their promise to discover and manage agents is very similar, including knowledge graphs, continuous monitoring, runtime security, tool access, MCP inspection, and more.
Some are updating their products to join the bandwagon. Until last year, AI security startup Reco primarily sold software for mapping and securing SaaS and AI platforms. It’s now repositioned around a broader solution that uses context graphs to connect agents to apps, people, accounts, and permissions, giving security teams a way to see what agents can reach and block access they don’t need.
According to Reco co-founder and CEO Ofer Klein, the biggest change over the past year that has driven the startup to expand its reach is that companies are building and deploying AI agents faster than they can even fathom. For one of his Fortune 100 clients, Reco’s platform discovered 21,000 agents the company didn’t know about, he said. The startup also claims to have identified an agent set up by a former employee at a large financial services customer that was able to access Salesforce and share that data with domains unknown to the company.
“The current market demand for agent security is not just about the agent itself; it’s about the entire end-to-end ecosystem,” Klein told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
Klein is not alone in stressing the urgency for companies to secure this sprawl. Chris Sestito, co-founder and CEO of security startup HiddenLayer, told me earlier this month that once agents reach production, the scale of cost and risk goes from theoretical to “full scale really quickly,” and that more than 50 of his customers have AI agents touching critical systems and sensitive assets in production.
Another AI startup, Symphony, said it discovered about 85,000 files in publicly traded U.S. companies that had been made accessible to AI tools and agents.
There’s no doubt that a lot of investors are interested in companies that can make a lot of money by helping companies find and secure all these agents, and Reco is capitalizing on that demand. The startup announced Tuesday that it has raised $55 million, on top of a $30 million Series B in February. Customer AT&T invested in the expansion through its venture arm, as well as Forestay and Quadrille Capital.
Mr. Klein said the company’s valuation has “more than doubled” since the Series B was first announced in February, and he gave a vague estimate of “in the low hundreds of millions of dollars,” although he did not provide further details. Current annual recurring revenue is in the “double digit millions of dollars” and will triple this year, he said. The startup has more than 100 customers, with financial services companies accounting for about 40% of its business.
Reco’s bet appears to be that its historical coverage of SaaS apps and its growing offering of AI agents will help it stand out from the crowd. The company currently integrates with more than 280 apps, and new integrations can be added within days, Klein said. Klein said the platform uses browser and network signals to find agents outside of directly connected apps within an enterprise, with controls to inspect prompts and tool invocations.
The startup plans to use the new funding for hiring, sales, partnerships and customer support. This new funding brings Reco’s total funding to $140 million.
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