CEO and co-founder Shahar Bahat told TechCrunch that a newly released AI tool can appear inside a customer’s environment within two hours. She also said about 60% of the risks Pluto detects come from tools created by non-developers, with finance teams accounting for the largest share, followed by marketing and legal.
In one case, Pluto said it discovered a finance employee at a Fortune 500 company had built an app to manage customer information and churn, but the application had been left exposed to the internet.
Pluto began selling its product in April and says it has already surpassed $2 million in annual recurring revenue. The company has more than 30 enterprise customers, including Oscar Health, Workato, Sixt and AlphaSense.
The startup’s financing includes an earlier $8.5 million seed round led by TLV Partners, with participation from the founders of Armis. Its more recent Series A was led by Jump Capital and included Skinos, Ansa Capital and angel investors.
Pluto’s software is built around monitoring both employee activity and the behavior of AI agents as they operate. The company tracks the AI tools in use across an organization as well as the skills, extensions, MCP servers and other components those systems depend on.
“We're moving from user behavior to agent behavior,” Bahat said.
The platform is designed to identify risky components, detect potentially dangerous agent activity and apply security policies without broadly blocking employees from using AI tools.
To do that, Pluto connects with endpoint security and device management systems and can deploy its own sensors. The company says it gathers information including prompts, commands, active processes, permissions and prior user activity.
Pluto also uses lightweight models on endpoints to evaluate what an AI agent appears to be trying to do.
The company says its system can intervene during an active session. If an agent attempts to obtain broader permissions than the user intended, Pluto can stop the action or insert instructions that require the agent to seek confirmation.
“We can inject context back to the session, and this way I can change how the agent is working,” Bahat said.
Pluto is also using a free security service called Plutonium to reach prospective customers and gather information about emerging AI risks. The platform lets users examine publicly available AI skills, connectors and add-ons, and includes an MCP scanner and a catalog of verified components.
Bahat said thousands of security professionals use Plutonium and that 70% of Pluto’s sales pipeline now comes from inbound interest.
The company plans to use its new capital to expand product development, increase its security research work and grow its U.S. presence. Pluto currently has 40 employees across the U.S. and Israel.
The startup is entering a market where companies are trying to secure AI systems that can act with a degree of autonomy rather than simply respond to user inputs. Pluto’s approach is to give security teams visibility not only into which AI tools employees are adopting, but also into what those systems are doing once they begin operating inside a company’s environment.
This analysis is based on reporting from the tech buzz & TechCrunch.
Image courtesy of Pluto Security.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
