Straiker

01

Overview

Straiker was founded in March 2025 with a deliberate bet: that the real AI security problem was never the model, it was everything agents do above it. While the rest of the industry rushed to secure LLM outputs, Straiker's founders looked forward and built for the threat surface that was coming, autonomous agents taking real actions, calling real tools, processing untrusted content at scale, and making decisions no static rule set could anticipate. That forward-thinking thesis, backed by a $21 million seed round from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, has since been validated faster than almost any security startup on record. In under 12 months, Straiker became the fastest-growing agentic-first AI security company, landing multiple six- and seven-figure deals across financial services, healthcare, consumer electronics, and frontier AI labs. The company's STAR Research team, comprising two-thirds of the organization and drawing from FireEye, Mandiant, Microsoft, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense, has disclosed critical vulnerabilities in Cursor and Perplexity, with findings featured in Forbes, The Register, MSN, and Yahoo. Straiker has been named to the Fortune Cyber 60 for two consecutive years and to CB Insights' 100 Most Innovative AI Startups in 2026. Seed funded and already closing a Series A, Straiker is the startup that saw where AI security needed to go before the rest of the market knew it had a problem.

02

Key Capabilities

Since its inception, Straiker has focused on building core products (not a platform) that secure agentic applications across their full lifecycle: Straiker Discover AI for visibility and governance, Straiker Ascend AI for continuous adversarial testing, and Straiker Defend AI for runtime detection and enforcement. Built by a research-led team from day one, every capability in the product is grounded in original threat intelligence generated by practitioners who have operated at the intersection of AI and security at the highest levels of the industry. The market has responded accordingly: Straiker is the fastest-growing agentic-first AI security company, closing multiple six- and seven-figure deals within 10 months of founding across financial services, healthcare, consumer electronics, and frontier AI labs.

Core capabilities include:

AI asset discovery and governance (Discover AI): Complete visibility across coding agents, productivity agents, custom-built applications, and 17,000+ catalogued MCP servers, with live allow/deny enforcement
Continuous adversarial testing (Ascend AI): Automated attack simulation across 67+ controls in 10+ categories, powered by real-world agentic datasets from frontier AI lab engagements and millions of synthetic data points, delivering the highest attack success rate in the industry
Runtime detection and guardrails (Defend AI): 98.1% detection accuracy at sub-300ms latency with 6 to 21 times lower false positive rates than frontier model judges, covering coding agents, productivity agents, and custom-built agents across the full agentic trace
Multimodal threat detection: Detects threats in text, code, images, audio, and file uploads, including steganography and document-based indirect injection that text-only tools cannot see
Original vulnerability research: STAR Labs has disclosed critical vulnerabilities in production AI tools including Cursor (NomShub) and Perplexity Comet, with findings covered in Forbes, The Register, MSN, and Yahoo
Compliance readiness: Controls mapped to NIST AI RMF, OWASP Top 10 for LLMs, and EU AI Act, with audit logs and dashboards built for regulated industries

03

How we are different

Straiker is not a cybersecurity company that hired AI talent, and it is not an AI company that bolted on security. Straiker is deliberately at the intersection of both disciplines, built by founders who have already done this once at scale, led by a research team that generates original intelligence rather than repackaging what others have already found.

Co-founder pedigree that has already built the category once.

Ankur Shah, CEO, scaled Prisma Cloud at Palo Alto Networks from a single module to a $500 million ARR business covering 70% of the Fortune 100, and was named Cyber Executive of the Year by SC Awards in 2026. He has done the hard work of building a security category from zero to market dominance inside one of the industry's most demanding organizations.
Sreenath Kurupati, CTO & Co-Founder, built Cyberfend (YC-backed) that protected ~1B transactions/month before its acquisition by Akamai in 2016. He then served as VP of AI, Data Science & Security Research at Akamai, with 15+ years at Intel and multiple granted patents.

A research organization, not just a product company.

Straiker's STAR Research team comprises two-thirds of the company, drawing from FireEye, Mandiant, Microsoft, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Defense. It produces original threat intelligence that directly feeds the product:

Uuncovered a live campaign across 88 domains impersonating Claude Code, JetBrains, and NotebookLM, deploying the first infostealer built to specifically target AI developer API keys, with C2 infrastructure hidden on the Binance Smart Chain to prevent takedown.
Disclosed the NomShub vulnerability chain in Cursor, demonstrating how a malicious repository can silently hijack a developer's machine through indirect prompt injection and sandbox breakout
Discovered that Perplexity Comet's AI browser could wipe a user's entire Google Drive from a single email, with zero clicks required
Published research showing that 91% of successful attacks against productivity agents result in silent data exfiltration, with no jailbreak or phishing link needed (research releasing June 29)
Active contributors to the OWASP GenAI Project through Chief Architect Venkata Sai Kishore Modalavalasa, with original work featured in Forbes and on NPR
Built Breach: Grid City, the world's first fully playable video game CTF for agentic AI security, with challenges modeled on real attack classes by the STAR Research team

Speed of execution that the market has validated.

Founded in March 2025 with a $21 million seed round from Bain Capital Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, Straiker became the fastest-growing agentic-first AI security company in under 12 months. Customers include frontier AI labs, global financial institutions, and enterprise technology companies across North America, APJ, and EMEA. Named to the Fortune Cyber 60 for two consecutive years and to CB Insights' 100 Most Innovative AI Startups in 2026. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, CA, with offices in India, the UK, Mexico, and Canada, Straiker is built as a globally distributed team from day one.

04

Gallery