Berlin's Cygrid Raises $2.9M to Stop AI Agents from Leaking Your Data

Jan de Vries · 2026-10-23

Cygrid, a Berlin-based cybersecurity startup, just stepped out of stealth with a $2.9 million pre-Seed round. Their mission? To stop AI agents from getting their hands on your company's confidential data. And honestly, it's about time someone tackled this. The funding was led by Atlantic, a pan-European pre-Seed fund, with participation from D11Z (backed by the Schwarz family office) and angels like Boris Gorin (VP Product at Zscaler and founder of Canonic Security), Andreas Bermig (CEO of bonify), and Vlad Tropko of AmberVale Capital. "Dmitry and Dekel are proven builders who combine deep cybersecurity experience with a real understanding of what enterprises need: security that stops the wrong action without slowing the business down," said Marc-Olivier Lücke, General Partner at Atlantic. "AI agents are widening the identity attack surface faster than any control can keep up. Intelligence-driven enforcement is the only answer that scales. The timing for Cygrid couldn't be better." ### The Problem: AI Agents Are a Security Blind Spot Cygrid was founded in January 2026 by Dmitry Kharchenko and Dekel Paz, both veterans of Israeli Military Intelligence. They saw a gap: as AI agents proliferate inside enterprises, traditional identity and access management (IAM) tools just can't keep up. Conventional IAM grants access at sign-in and then stops. But once a token is valid, it's a free-for-all. Cygrid changes that by enforcing limits continuously—checking every action an agent takes and blocking or narrowing it in real time. It also maps human, non-human, and AI agent identities into a single intelligence graph, correlating what each identity is entitled to, what it actually does, and on whose behalf it acts. "Access control tells you who can log in. It says nothing about what they do next," said Kharchenko, CEO and co-founder. "Every identity in an enterprise can act, and once a token is valid, not one control in the stack can stop the action. Cygrid is the platform that does: it decides what each identity may do and enforces it before anything executes." ### Traction: 19 Design Partners in 9 Months In just nine months post-incorporation, Cygrid is already working with 19 design partners across FinTech, e-commerce, and SaaS—six of which are in production. One early deployment with a Berlin-based D2C company uncovered AI agents and third-party app connections that the company's own security team didn't know about. Cygrid helped remediate over 100 risky findings. The timing makes sense. According to Palo Alto Networks, machine identities now outnumber human ones by 109 to 1, with 79 of those being AI agents. A CrowdStrike report from 2026 found that 82% of cyber detections involve no malware at all—attackers are simply exploiting trusted identities like leaked tokens or compromised agent providers. And with more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies already deploying AI agents—and nearly a third of employees using connected agents without organizational approval, per Microsoft's Cyber Pulse report 2026—the opportunity is massive. ### What's Next? Cygrid will use the fresh capital to expand its enforcement capabilities, grow the team, and scale go-to-market operations across Europe. The goal? To become the European alternative to US and Israeli providers of AI identity security. "This funding allows us to scale that approach and help organizations move from reactive identity security to continuous, real-time enforcement, so they can adopt AI agents at full speed without losing control of what those agents can do," Kharchenko added. For European startups, Cygrid's raise is a signal that AI security is heating up—and investors are paying attention.