Pluto Security Emerges From Stealth With $42 Million to Watch How Employees Actually Use AI Tools

Pluto Security, an Israeli-US startup building security software for the AI workspace, emerged from stealth with $42 million in total funding. The round splits into an $8.5 million seed led by TLV Partners — with the founders of cybersecurity firm Armis participating — and a $34 million Series A led by Jump Capital, joined by Skinos, the venture firm of Check Point co-founder Shlomo Kramer, along with Ansa Capital and angel investors.

The company's premise is that corporate security has lost track of what employees are actually doing with AI. CEO and co-founder Shahar Bahat told TechCrunch that a newly released AI tool can show up inside a customer's environment within two hours of launch, long before any security team has evaluated it.

Pluto's platform monitors the AI tools in use across an organization, plus the components they depend on: skills, extensions, MCP servers, and the applications and agents employees build with them. It connects to endpoint security and device management systems and deploys its own sensors, gathering prompts, commands, active processes, and permissions. Lightweight models running on endpoints evaluate what an AI agent appears to be trying to do, and the system can act mid-session — blocking an action, or injecting instructions that force the agent to ask for confirmation first. The pitch is control without bans: flag what is risky, keep the work moving.

The company's early data points to where the danger actually sits. Bahat said roughly 60 percent of the risks Pluto detects across its customer base come from tools vibe-coded by non-developers, with finance departments the biggest source, followed by marketing and legal — developers rank fourth. In one case, Pluto found that a finance employee at a Fortune 500 company had built an app to manage customer information and churn, and had left it exposed to the open internet.

The founding team came out of the enterprise security establishment. Bahat held senior cybersecurity roles at Microsoft and Palo Alto Networks and is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree; co-founder Tal Ofer Regev ran research and development for more than 150 people as a vice president at Palo Alto Networks; co-founder Gil Maman spent over six years in Israeli military intelligence in technical roles. The company has grown to roughly 50 employees across the United States and Israel.

The business is moving quickly for a company that started selling in April. Pluto has crossed $2 million in annual recurring revenue with more than 30 enterprise customers, including Oscar Health, Workato, Sixt, and AlphaSense. About 70 percent of its pipeline now arrives inbound, driven in part by Plutonium, a free AI supply-chain security hub powered by the company's RisksDB that includes an MCP scanner and a catalog of verified components — a resource the company says thousands of security professionals already use.

"Pluto has built a fundamentally different GTM engine for cybersecurity," said Saaya Pal, partner at Jump Capital, pointing to the decision to give part of the risk database away in a market where public data on what AI tools actually do inside enterprises barely exists.

What it means: security tooling is following the same path AI adoption did — first the chatbot, then the agent. Bahat's shorthand for the shift is that the industry is moving "from user behavior to agent behavior," and vendors that can observe and interrupt an agent mid-task are betting that visibility, not blocking, is what enterprises will pay for while their employees keep building apps no one approved.