Pluto Security Raises $42M To Police Enterprise AI Agents

Analysis

Pluto Security emerged from stealth with $42 million in total funding, TechCrunch reported, raised across two rounds:

• Seed -- $8.5M, led by TLV Partners, with cybersecurity firm Armis' founders also investing.
• Series A -- $34M, led by Jump Capital, with participation from Skinos (Check Point co-founder Shlomo Kramer's venture firm) and Ansa Capital.

What Pluto actually does

Pluto's software gives security teams visibility into how employees use AI tools, skills, browser extensions, MCP servers and agents -- software that often gets adopted without IT's knowledge. It connects to existing endpoint security and device-management systems, deploys lightweight sensors, and can intervene mid-task, such as blocking an agent that requests permissions beyond what a user intended or prompting it to ask for confirmation first. In April, Pluto launched Plutonium, a free tool for scanning public AI skills, connectors and add-ons for risk, alongside an MCP scanner.

CEO and co-founder Shahar Bahat said the company has not run a single proof-of-concept without finding something malicious. "In general, I'll say there was not one POC in which we entered and didn't find malicious stuff," she told TechCrunch. Roughly 60% of the risky tools Pluto's sensors detect were built by non-developers -- finance employees topped the list, followed by marketing and legal, with developers ranking fourth -- and a newly released AI tool can show up inside a company's environment within two hours of launch. In one case, Pluto found a vibe-coded customer-management app built by a finance employee at a Fortune 500 company, left exposed to the internet.

Pluto began selling in April and has already crossed $2 million in annual recurring revenue with more than 30 enterprise customers, including Oscar Health, Workato, Sixt and AlphaSense -- traction TechCrunch described as part of a broader crop of AI-security startups, alongside companies like Zenity and LayerX, racing to address the same gap. Bahat said thousands of security professionals already use Plutonium and that 70% of Pluto's sales pipeline now comes from inbound interest, though she did not specify how much of that traces directly to the free scanner.

The round underscores how quickly enterprise security budgets are reorienting around agent behavior rather than just user behavior. "We're moving from user behavior to agent behavior," Bahat said. But the category is young and crowded enough that differentiation may prove harder than fundraising: with 40 employees split across the US and Israel, Pluto will need to convert its POC-conversion pitch into renewal data before the next funding conversation, and larger security vendors with existing enterprise footholds could still move to bundle similar agent-monitoring features rather than let standalone startups own the category.