Neo raises $100 million to hunt the zombie AI agents haunting your company
· Fortune
I was tardy to my own interview, but my AI notetaker was right on time.
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It captured Neo CEO and co-founder Nick Warner describing a call he’d been on a few weeks earlier. Three people were on it, along with about seven AI notetakers that had joined the meeting as well. Warner’s co-founder Shlomi Salem has three of his own notetakers and often starts meetings by disabling them while one keeps trying to resurrect itself.
“Just racking up tokens,” Warner quipped.
It’s a fitting scene to describe Neo, which emerged from stealth this week with a $100 million seed and Series A investment, with backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners. Every notetaker that joins a meeting traces back to a reasonably sensible individual choice to keep a credible set of notes in an endless sea of meetings. The trouble starts afterward. The tools you once approved to keep tabs on your appointments now have agentic capabilities, and vendors keep adding bells and whistles. Eventually, the tools that were already cleared by a company for drafting meeting notes have morphed into a multi-pronged computer squid that can summarize points, draft follow-up emails, and recruit other systems to join it all with permission you granted back when it was far more restrained.
That gap, between what you set up a year ago and what’s happening now and next year, is what Neo is hoping to secure. Warner says most companies can’t see into it at all.
“It’s a communication channel, medium, and a dimension that customers around the world, large and small, are almost entirely blind to,” Warner said. “They’re fumbling in the dark.”
Neo has built what Warner calls a full endpoint sensor, which, in layman’s terms, means software that sits on the machine where a person and an AI tool actually meet. Warner says Neo handles three critical tasks which include inventorying every piece of agentic software installed; assessing how each is configured; and, enforcing policies on what each is permitted to do. According to Warner, Neo is the first to combine all three into a single product. That thesis has drawn Andreessen Horowitz general partner Zane Lackey and Bessemer partner Elliott Robinson to take seats on Neo’s board, and brought investment from Craft and Merlin Ventures.
The Neo approach breaks with the direction much of the security industry was moving a year ago, when the consensus was to guard a chokepoint, said Warner. Watch how AI tools talk and interact with other systems and you’ll guard everything. But Warner claims that approach is now obsolete because frontier models can directly call up tools, operate computers, and route themselves around monitored communication channels completely. And older defenses don’t transfer, said Warner, because they work by baselining normal behavior and flagging deviations. Software that can reason on its own doesn’t have a normal to measure against.
For Warner, the issue was worth leaving his post as chief operating officer of SentinelOne, where he built the go-to-market organization and helped take the company public in 2021. Warner’s fellow co-founder Salem–with the zombie notetaker–led detection engineering and threat research there for more than a decade. The third co-founder, Eran Shirazi, co-founded customer workflow AI firm EasySend and previously ran a vulnerability research group in Israel Defense Forces’ elite signal intelligence group, Unit 8200.
The issue needed a “clean sheet redesign,” said Warner, and he claims it will be hard for larger security companies to keep up. He declined to share any financial metrics, but said Neo is already running in financial services, healthcare, insurance, and manufacturing companies.
And in Warner’s view, success will be based on whether the cybersecurity community finds Neo stable, and easy to deploy and integrate with the tools a team already has at hand. If the business can do all that at once, it becomes a go-to-market strategy because at the end of the day, the cybersecurity industry unites against adversaries—and talks incessantly about tools they like to fight them.
“We’re not just going to have customers, “ said Warner. “We’ll have fans.”
See you Monday,
Amanda Gerut
Email: [email protected]
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com