The founders
Neo’s three co-founders all came out of SentinelOne. CEO Nick Warner built the company’s go-to-market organization from the ground up and, as COO, took SentinelOne public in 2021, after earlier security leadership roles at Cylance, McAfee, and Forcepoint. Co-founder Shlomi Salem led SentinelOne’s detection engineering for more than a decade and co-led its in-house threat research team. Co-founder Eran Shirazi previously co-founded the customer experience company EasySend and, before that, led research and development inside the IDF’s Unit 8200 vulnerability research group. It’s a founding team that has already built and scaled a category-defining security company once.
Why now
Gartner estimates only 5% of enterprise applications had agentic capabilities in 2025 — rising to 40% by the end of 2026. That shift is happening on two fronts at once: employees are adopting AI agents and tools bottom-up, while the SaaS vendors enterprises already approved are quietly adding agentic capabilities into products already inside the security perimeter. Either way, SecOps teams end up needing to secure software that can reason, invoke tools, inherit user permissions, and chain actions across a workflow — behavior that doesn’t fit the assumptions most existing security tooling was built on.
What Neo does
Neo positions itself as a real-time control layer for this shift, built around five capabilities: a continuously updated inventory of AI agents, AI-enabled applications, plugins, extensions, and MCP servers running across the enterprise (powered by Neo’s own knowledge base, “Neoverse”); capability and risk intelligence on what that software can actually do and access; real-time attribution tying every action back to the responsible human, agent, application, or identity; granular policy control over tool calls, API access, and data movement; and native enforcement that can block risky activity directly, rather than handing it off to another tool.
The round
Neo emerged from stealth on July 20, 2026, with $100 million in combined seed and Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures also participating. The Boston-based company plans to use the capital to scale its engineering and go-to-market teams.
Why it matters for founders
Any founder wiring third-party AI agents or agentic features into a product used inside larger enterprises should expect security review to change shape: “what data can this agent touch, and what did it actually do” is becoming a standing question rather than a one-time procurement checkbox. Neo is a signal of where enterprise buyers’ attention — and budget — is heading on that front.