A finance employee at a Fortune 500 company built an app to manage customer information and churn, but left it exposed to the internet—illustrating the security risks that emerge when workers create AI-powered tools without proper oversight. Pluto Security, a startup that emerged from stealth on October 13, 2026, raised $42 million to address these vulnerabilities by monitoring how employees use and build AI tools across enterprises. The company's technology helps businesses gain visibility and control over AI adoption, which CEO Shahar Bahat says is creating new security gaps as workers deploy tools in unforeseen ways.

The pace of AI tool adoption inside companies has accelerated dramatically, with newly announced AI tools appearing in corporate environments within just two hours of public release, according to Bahat. Roughly 60% of the security threats Pluto identifies across its client base originate from tools built by non-technical staff, with finance departments representing the largest source of such vulnerabilities, followed by marketing and legal teams—developers rank fourth. Since launching sales in April, Pluto has surpassed $2 million in annual recurring revenue and signed more than 30 enterprise customers, including Oscar Health, Workato, Sixt, and AlphaSense. The startup's funding includes an $8.5 million seed round led by TLV Partners, with participation from Armis founders, and a recent $34 million Series A led by Jump Capital, with Skinos, Ansa Capital, and angel investors joining.

Bahat told TechCrunch that security risks aren't confined to large tech firms leading AI adoption—they vary based on how willing an organization is to embrace AI and the mindset of its chief information security officer. "In general, I'll say there was not one POC in which we entered and didn't find malicious stuff," she said, noting that some companies had active live attacks during proof-of-concept evaluations. Pluto's platform monitors the AI tools employees use, the skills, extensions, and MCP servers those tools depend on, and the apps and agents being created, identifying risky components and enforcing security policies without blocking AI usage. The system can intervene while an agent is working—if an agent attempts to gain permissions beyond what a user intended, Pluto can halt the action or inject instructions that prompt the agent to ask for confirmation.

The company's approach reflects a shift from tracking user behavior to monitoring agent behavior, Bahat explained, betting that securing AI environments requires real-time attention to what agents are doing alongside oversight of what employees build and deploy. Pluto connects to endpoint security and device management systems, deploying sensors that gather information including prompts, commands, running processes, permissions, and users' prior activity, using lightweight models on endpoints to assess agent intentions. The startup also launched Plutonium in April, a free platform that lets anyone check risks associated with publicly available AI skills, connectors, and add-ons, which Bahat says has attracted thousands of security professionals and now generates 70% of Pluto's sales pipeline through inbound interest. The company plans to invest its new capital in product development, expanding security research efforts, and growing its U.S. presence across its 40 employees in the U.S. and Israel. As enterprises race to deploy AI tools without corresponding security infrastructure, the choice between enabling innovation and preventing exposure will force security teams to rethink traditional perimeter defenses. The question isn't whether AI agents will be built by employees outside IT departments, but whether companies can detect and govern them before vulnerabilities become breaches.