Security Startup Pillar Raises $9 Million to Tackle AI-Specific Risks

Artificial intelligence (AI) security startup Pillar Security has raised $9 million in seed funding to expand its research and development (R&D) and go-to-market efforts.

Pillar Security’s solution is designed to meet the needs of a new age in which “software has gained agency and data itself has become executable,” Pillar Security CEO and Co-founder Dor Sarig said in a Wednesday (April 16) press release.

“Pillar’s technology, backed by real-world AI threat intelligence, is built with this understanding, delivering a new class of protection designed explicitly for AI-related security risks,” Sarig said. “We are redefining application security to match the agentic and autonomous software of the Intelligence Age.”

The company’s security platform is specifically designed for AI-integrated software systems and addresses AI-specific risk areas like evasion attacks, data poisoning, data privacy and intellectual property leakage, according to the release.

The platform integrates with an organization’s existing code repositories, data infrastructures and AI/ML platforms, automatically maps all AI-related assets across the organization, tests AI models and deploys guardrails that proactively prevent failures, the release said.

Elias Manousos, lead investor at Shield Capital, which led the funding round, said in the release that Pillar understands that it takes more than incremental improvements to secure software at a time when more agentic AI solutions are being deployed within businesses and the threat surface is expanding.

“Their visionary approach sets a new standard for how organizations secure and manage intelligent systems,” Manousos said.

AI agents are different from rules-based bots, where actions are pre-determined, PYMNTS reported in March. AI agents built on top of generative AI models can dynamically generate responses, understand, adapt and learn while having autonomy and decision-making capabilities to complete a task given by the user.

That means chief financial officers should approach agentic AI like past forms of automation they’ve incorporated — evaluating what processes can benefit, identifying costs that can be removed, finding potential benefits from accelerating work, and assessing risks to finance and reputation, George Westerman, senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, told PYMNTS in March.

Fifty-five percent of chief operating officers say their companies have already implemented AI-based automated cybersecurity management systems — a threefold increase from earlier in the year — according to the PYMNTS Intelligence report, “COOs Leverage GenAI to Reduce Data Security Losses.”