Funding Brief｜Zenity Series C $125M

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Funding Details

What This Company Does

Zenity is a security and governance platform built specifically for AI agents — while most of the industry's security budget still goes toward protecting the model itself and individual prompts, Zenity is betting on a completely different attack surface: once an agent has permission to act autonomously inside enterprise systems, the real risk is what it does, not what it was asked.

The platform has three layers: discovery and observability (a live inventory of every agent in the environment, who owns it, what it can reach, how it behaves), governance and posture (secure-by-design policies enforced before deployment and continuously validated as agents evolve), and detection and response (step-level runtime monitoring that stops unsafe actions before they complete, with every incident feeding back into the detection engine). Gartner named Zenity a Cool Vendor in Agentic AI TRiSM in 2025, and its April 2026 report went further, calling Zenity "the Company to Beat in AI Agent Governance." The company also contributes research to open security frameworks including the OWASP Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS.

Co-founders Ben Kliger and Michael Bargury both came from Microsoft, where they identified the insight behind the company: as low-code automation tools evolved into agents, they left behind a governance gap that no existing security vendor had filled — Zenity was working on this before "agent" was a widely used term. Bargury himself is a well-known security researcher in the field.

What This Funding Signals

Implications for the Agent Ecosystem

Zenity is already tracked in the quidproquo watchlist (section B7), and this $125M Series C lands at the front edge of the same wave of "agent behavior governance" funding: within three weeks, Onyx Security closed a $113M Series B and Obsidian Security closed an $85M Series D, with all three "agent runtime governance" specialists raising more than $320M combined in the same month. That's a signal this lane has moved from "one company owns it" to "investors believe it can support several companies" — agent governance has become its own security budget line, not a feature attached to model safety.

What Investors Are Betting On

Norwest's own lead-investor blog post states the thesis in its title: "The Agent Is the New Perimeter." Traditional security is built around network boundaries and identity boundaries, but autonomous agents break both concepts at once — which is why the argument goes that agents need a governance platform built for them from scratch, not a retrofit of existing tools. The strategic follow-on from SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Hitachi, and LG Technology Ventures — all with industrial and manufacturing footprints — sends a clear signal: they're not just betting on agents inside enterprise IT, but on the governance need once agents reach deeper into operational technology and industrial systems.

Numbers Worth Watching

• A 230+ person team is the largest headcount among the agent-security startups covered in this same funding wave, suggesting Zenity has moved past pure R&D into scaled sales and customer success.
• Total funding of roughly $185M is the accumulated result of building since 2021 — years before "agent" was a mainstream term.
• Zenity ($125M), Onyx ($113M), and Obsidian ($85M) — three "agent runtime governance" companies — raised more than $320M combined in the same month, a sign that capital concentration in this lane is accelerating fast.

Watchlist Status

Zenity is already tracked in watchlist section B7 (Agent Security / Governance). Updated tracking focus: the $125M Series C (led by Norwest), Gartner's "Company to Beat in AI Agent Governance" designation, the "agent is the new perimeter" thesis, and the potential extension into OT/industrial governance now that SoftBank, Hitachi, and LG have joined as strategic investors.

Today's Takeaway

When Zenity was founded in 2021, "AI agent" wasn't yet a widely used term — the company arrived at this problem by working backward from a governance gap inside Microsoft's low-code automation tools, not by walking into the 2025-2026 agent hype cycle. That mirrors the trajectory of Onyx and Obsidian, both raising large rounds in the same period: nearly everyone landing the biggest checks in this "agent governance" funding wave has been chewing on this hard problem for two or three years, not assembling a team once the trend became obvious. The takeaway: judging whether a security category is real might have less to do with who's raising the most money right now, and more to do with who was already doing the work before there was any hype to ride.

References

• Zenity Raises $125 Million to Secure the Era of 1 Billion AI Agents — Business Wire (official press release)
• The Agent Is the New Perimeter: Why We're Leading Zenity's Series C — Norwest Venture Partners (official announcement)
• SoftBank, Hitachi, LG back Zenity's $125 million Norwest-led round to police AI agents — Fortune