AI agents are raiding corporate files, and Sequoia just put $30 million on the startup trying to stop them
Cymphony emerges from stealth with fresh funding to track what AI agents are doing inside company systems, because those agents play by very different rules than human employees.
Key points
- Cymphony raised $30 million in a Series A round co-led by Sequoia Capital and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, announced in 2025.
- The New York and Tel Aviv startup is valued at more than $100 million after the investment.
- At one unnamed US public company, Cymphony found roughly 85,000 corporate files had become accessible to AI tools without anyone noticing.
- An external collaborator at another firm secretly installed an AI assistant that silently scanned thousands of sensitive documents.
- Cymphony has signed a double-digit number of enterprise customers, including KKR and Syngenta, and hit seven-figure annual revenue in its first year of sales.
Imagine a new employee who can read every file in the office, work at superhuman speed, and never has to sign in through the front door. That is roughly what an AI agent, software that can carry out multi-step tasks on its own, looks like from a security team's perspective.
Most corporate security systems were built for people: a person logs in, their job title defines what they can see, and someone notices if they go somewhere they should not. AI agents do not fit that picture. They can access dozens of systems at once, change how they behave mid-task, and in some cases spin up other agents to help. Standard security tools have no clean way to track any of that.
Cymphony, a two-year-old startup, is trying to fill that gap. The company builds a "workforce graph", a live map of every employee, AI agent, and automated system inside a company, showing exactly which data and tools each one can reach. Security teams get a single dashboard instead of a dozen disconnected logs.
What risks has Cymphony actually found inside real companies?
Real incidents, not hypotheticals. At one unnamed US public company, Cymphony found around 85,000 files had silently become readable by AI tools. The startup says it closed that exposure and confirmed none of the files had been accessed through those systems.
In a second case, an external contractor had quietly installed an unauthorised copy of Anthropic's Claude, an AI assistant made by the AI safety company Anthropic. That assistant used the contractor's existing access to scan thousands of sensitive documents. Nobody inside the company had approved it.
These cases illustrate a pattern Cymphony CEO Shy Dekel calls the core problem: "Enterprise security was designed for human employees. More and more, there start to be independent entities that are practically joining the workforce, but they're no longer people."
Why did Sequoia bet on this team before the product even existed?
Sequoia first backed Cymphony at seed stage, before the startup had a product or a clear direction. The bet was on the founders: Dekel, Idan Berkovits, and Edi Gotlieb all came through Talpiot, the Israeli military's highly selective technology leadership programme. Sequoia already knew that pipeline through earlier investments, including cybersecurity giant Wiz.
| Funding detail | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total Series A raised | $30 million |
| Series A lead investors | Sequoia Capital, SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund |
| Post-money valuation | More than $100 million |
| Year founded | 2023 |
| Annual recurring revenue | Seven figures (first year of sales) |
| Employees | Around 30 |
By the Series A, Cymphony had something concrete to show: paying enterprise customers including the investment firm KKR, agrochemical company Syngenta, and financial services provider Cass Information Systems. Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky told TechCrunch the firm has also been using Cymphony's product internally.
What does this mean for ordinary workers?
For most employees, nothing changes today. But for IT and security teams, it signals a real shift in what they need to watch. AI agents are no longer just chatbots answering questions; they are active participants touching sensitive data.
Cymphony is not positioned as a replacement for existing security tools, at least not yet. Balkansky put it plainly: "Nobody's going to get rid of their Okta," referring to the identity management platform many large companies already use. For now, Cymphony sits alongside those tools as an extra layer of oversight.
Competitors include Microsoft, Okta, CyberArk, Wiz, and Varonis, all of which are expanding into this space. Cymphony's pitch is that it treats identity security and data security as one connected problem rather than two separate products.
