HelmGuard Raises $7.3 Million for Agentic GRC and Security
Agentic GRC and security startup HelmGuard raised a $7.3 million seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline.
HelmGuard, a UK-based startup founded in 2024 by former Palantir executive John Daley (CEO) and Jack Miller (CTO), announced a $7.3 million seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital, and Entrepreneurs First. The company builds agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software that collects risk signals directly from integrated source systems and uses AI agents to automate risk management, assurance, and control gap assessments. It claims the platform cuts assessment cycles to hours by unifying fragmented compliance and security data.
Sequoia doubles down on Cymphony as AI agents create new enterprise security risks
Cymphony emerges with $30M from Sequoia and SMBC to give security teams unified visibility into AI agent and non-human identities.
Cymphony, a New York- and Tel Aviv-based startup, raised a $25 million Series A co-led by Sequoia and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, valuing it above $100 million. Its platform builds a "workforce graph" unifying identity, data, and activity signals for employees, AI agents, and other non-human identities. The company says it found roughly 85,000 files exposed to AI tools at one US public company and reached seven-figure ARR in its first year of sales with customers including KKR and Syngenta. Sequoia previously led its undisclosed seed round, betting on Israeli Talpiot program alumni founders.
Dataminr uses agentic AI to predict and verify security threats
Dataminr launches agentic AI capabilities for corporate security, adding automated event corroboration, context, and near-term threat prediction.
Dataminr Advanced for Corporate Security introduces Agentic Corroboration, Agentic Context, and Near-Term Predictive Intelligence, now generally available, moving the company from real-time alerting to what it calls Autonomous Real-Time Intelligence. The product relies on more than 60 fine-tuned task-specific LLMs trained on a 10+ year proprietary event archive rather than general-purpose frontier models. Upcoming releases include ReGenAI Tailored Live Briefs, a Watchlist Agent, Agentic Search, and an Advanced API suite.
Exein Secures $270M at $1.7B Valuation for Physical AI Security
IoT security firm Exein raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation to expand runtime protection and physical AI security agents.
Italy-based IoT security startup Exein announced a $270 million oversubscribed round led by Headline, bringing total funding above $600 million and valuing the company at $1.7 billion. Exein builds embedded and kernel-level runtime protection for IoT devices and is developing a proprietary foundation model for physical AI security powering autonomous defense agents. The funding will accelerate expansion, particularly into the US market.
Why 2026 is the Year to Upgrade to an Agentic AI SOC
Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the production inflection point for agentic AI in security operations centers.
Elastic Security Labs argues 2026 is the practical inflection point for agentic AI SOCs, noting nearly two-thirds of organizations are experimenting with AI agents while fewer than one in four have production deployments. The piece outlines operational challenges and recommendations: treat agents as non-human identities with least-privilege tool access, version-control system prompts as code, deploy unified agents with on-demand task packages, and enforce per-agent budgets and rate limits. It stresses explainability via RAG and transparent reasoning traces so analysts can verify and override autonomous decisions.
Netography launches two new data collection agents to enhance security and data privacy capabilities
Fortinet expands AI security portfolio with Virtue AI acquisition
Fortinet acquired Virtue AI to add agent red-teaming, MCP scanning and runtime guardrails to its AI security portfolio.
Fortinet acquired Virtue AI to extend its Security for AI strategy beyond FortiAIGate, which protects LLMs from prompt injection, data leakage and model poisoning. Virtue AI brings automated agentic red-teaming across 50+ sandboxed environments and 14 domains, agent discovery and governance including MCP tool scanning, continuous AI validation, and real-time guardrails across text, images, video, audio and code. Financial terms were not disclosed and the consideration is immaterial to Fortinet; Gartner projects the AI security market to grow from $2.8B in 2026 to $16.4B by 2030.
What do CISOs need to rest easy about future AI risks?
IANS survey of 113 CISOs finds optimism about managing future AI security risks hinges more on organizational readiness and leadership support than current controls.
An IANS AI Security Survey of 113 CISOs fielded in April and May found 41% optimistic and 38% pessimistic about their organization's ability to manage AI security risks over the next 24 months. Six organizational signals—leadership understanding of AI risk, defined governance ownership, security team effectiveness with AI tools, CISO ownership of the AI-security budget, sustainable workloads, and staffing—separate confident CISOs from pessimistic ones. Interviewed analysts cautioned that these readiness signals measure self-assessed confidence rather than actual security, and recommended hands-on AI use by security teams plus governance of third-party models.
Top 10 Best Server Security Solutions in 2026
Cyber Security News ranks 2026 server security platforms, favoring Trend Micro for hybrid estates, CrowdStrike for detection, Defender for Azure economics.
Cyber Security News published an editorial ranking of ten server security platforms for 2026, favoring Trend Micro for hybrid estates, CrowdStrike for detection quality, and Microsoft Defender for Servers for Azure-centric economics. The guide stresses that server security licensing differs (per server, per core, or per cloud-hour) and flags hypervisor protection as a commonly missed coverage gap.
Top 10 Best Enterprise Browsers in 2026
2026 enterprise browser guide ranks Island first and notes Mammoth Cyber's wind-down plus corrections to standard vendor shortlists.
An editorial guide assesses ten enterprise browser options, ranking category creator Island first for last-mile DLP and BYOD controls, followed by Palo Alto's Talon browser as a Prisma Access/SASE surface and Google Chrome Enterprise Premium for DLP on already-deployed browsers. It corrects common lists, noting SlashNext is browser-adjacent phishing and BEC defense rather than a managed browser, and that Mammoth Cyber has wound down independent operations. Microsoft Edge for Business is positioned as effectively free policy depth for Microsoft 365 estates, with Menlo Security offering an isolation-plus-browser blend.
Imagine the SOC Without a Queue: From Alert Backlog to AI Hypothesis Engine
Corelight argues agentic AI should replace SOC alert queues with hypothesis-driven, machine-run investigations, reserving humans for judgment.
A Corelight opinion piece argues traditional SOC alert queues guarantee most alerts go unreviewed because human analysts are the investigative bottleneck. It proposes agentic AI that investigates signals within seconds, tests hypotheses against network telemetry asynchronously, and escalates only evidence-backed cases to humans. The vendor claims this inversion lowers cost per investigation, expands coverage, and converts security telemetry into actionable evidence.
Cybersecurity job ads demanding AI skills double in a year
AI skill requirements in G7 cybersecurity job postings doubled year-over-year to 28.5%, with AI-skill roles paying a 14.9% salary premium.
Research from the AI Workforce Consortium, Cornerstone and Indeed covering April 2024 to March 2026 found that 28.5% of G7 cybersecurity job postings between October 2025 and March 2026 required AI skills, double the 14.2% a year earlier. Lightcast salary data put median advertised pay for AI-skill postings 14.9% above the overall cybersecurity median in the US. Senior-titled postings grew 65% in six months while junior titles only recently returned to growth, and a Cisco survey of 8,000 security leaders flagged hands-on AI-agent experience and technical depth as the biggest entry-level gaps.