Cymphony Secures $30M for AI Agent Identity and Data Security
Cymphony has emerged with $30 million in funding to help enterprises govern the security risks created by AI agents working across sensitive data and corporate systems. The New York- and Tel Aviv-based startup said the financing includes a $25 million Series A co-led by Sequoia Capital and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, valuing it at more than $100 million after investment. Sequoia had also made an undisclosed seed investment.
The two-year-old company is addressing a growing problem: AI agents can access multiple enterprise systems and handle substantial volumes of corporate data without necessarily moving through the same identity and access controls used for employees. That can leave security teams with an incomplete view of who, or what, can reach sensitive resources.
A single view of human and non-human access
Cymphony’s platform is designed to give security teams a combined view of employees, AI agents and other non-human identities, together with the systems and sensitive data available to them. Its core product is a “workforce graph” that brings together identity, data and activity signals.
Co-founder and chief executive Shy Dekel said enterprise security had been designed around human employees, while independent entities are increasingly joining the workforce. The company uses AI agents to investigate incidents, prioritize remediation and automate selected actions, including correcting access permissions. Customers can also choose a managed service involving Cymphony security experts for more complex situations.
Cymphony said it has already identified exposures at large companies. At one U.S. public company, it found about 85,000 files that had become accessible to AI tools and agents. The startup said it helped close the exposure and verified that none of those files had been accessed through the AI systems. In another case, Dekel said an external collaborator installed an unsanctioned instance of Anthropic’s Claude that used the collaborator’s existing access to scan thousands of sensitive files.
Sequoia’s renewed investment
Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky said the firm’s seed investment came before Cymphony had a product or settled on a clear product direction. The initial decision was based largely on Dekel and co-founders Idan Berkovits and Edi Gotlieb, who all came through Talpiot, Israel’s selective military technology and leadership programme.
By the Series A, Cymphony had built a product, signed a double-digit number of enterprise customers and reached seven figures in annual recurring revenue within its first year of sales, the company said. Customers include KKR, Syngenta, Cass Information Systems and Athennian. Sequoia has used the product internally since early in its development, Balkansky said, and cited customer quality, breadth and expanding deployments as reasons to invest again.
Competition around agent security
Cymphony enters a crowded market that includes Microsoft, Okta, CyberArk, Wiz and Varonis, all of which are expanding work around identity, data and AI security. Balkansky said Cymphony’s distinction is to treat identity and data security as one problem. He also described the platform as an additional layer for customers today, rather than a replacement for established identity systems such as Okta.
The governance challenge is that agents can take different paths to complete tasks, gain capabilities and in some cases create other agents. These changing behaviours can make access harder to manage through controls designed for people with comparatively stable roles and permissions. For businesses deploying agents, the practical implication is to inventory non-human identities, link their permissions to the data and systems they can reach, and review that access as their capabilities change.