2026 WINNER · CYBERSECURITY STARS AWARDS
Akto · Agentic AI Security Platform
Best Cybersecurity Stratup
Overview
Akto is the security control plane for AI agents, MCP ecosystems, and the LLMs they depend on, purpose-built for the moment enterprises stopped asking "should we use AI?" and started asking "how do we secure what we've already deployed?"
As organizations rapidly ship homegrown agents, copilots, and LLM-powered workflows into production, traditional AppSec and cloud security tools have no answer for agentic execution risk. Akto does combining AI agent discovery, automated red teaming, posture management, and runtime guardrails in a single operational platform for modern security teams.
Akto was the first security vendor to ship MCP security, when the protocol was just four months old. Today, Akto has 50+ connectors across agent builders, AI gateways, and cloud platforms, and the largest adversarial probe library in the market at 4,500+ probes.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Akto is backed by Accel and Alumni Ventures, with angels including the founder of Tenable, the CEO of Sentry, and the CTO of Synack. Akto has been recognized by Forbes, Dark Reading, VentureBeat, and CSO Online as a cybersecurity startup to watch.
Akto is not catching up to this market. It stands out by defining and operationalizing a market that many enterprises now urgently need: AI Agent Security.
Key Capabilities
Akto operates purpose-built products architecture that covers both the employee AI agent layer and the homegrown AI agent application layer, giving security teams unified visibility and enforcement across the full agentic attack surface. Together, these six capabilities form a complete AI Agent security product:
- Agentic AI Discovery: Automatically discovers AI agents, MCP servers, tools, and connected resources across cloud environments, employee endpoints, browsers, and internal infrastructure via 80+ connectors.
- Automated AI Red Teaming: Continuously tests agents and LLM-connected workflows against real-world attacks, including prompt injection, tool misuse, privilege escalation, data exfiltration, and unsafe multi-step behaviors, backed by 4,000+ prebuilt and customizable test cases.
- Agentic Security Posture Management: Identifies misconfigurations, over-permissioned tools, unsafe data access paths, exposed MCPs, and policy gaps across the AI environment.
- Runtime AI Guardrails & Enforcement: Blocks malicious prompts, unsafe tool calls, harmful outputs, data leakage, and unauthorized actions in real time.
- Endpoint + homegrown Architecture: Delivers broad coverage across both employee-driven AI usage and homegrown or cloud-deployed AI systems, eliminating Shadow AI and hidden agent sprawl.
- AI Agent Context Graph & Attack Surface Mapping: Builds contextual visibility across agents, tools, resources, permissions, prompts, and action paths to show how AI systems actually behave in production
How we are different
Three things set Akto apart:
1) Full lifecycle coverage, not point solutions.
Akto does not stop at testing or observability. It provides a complete operational program for AI security teams: discover → map → test → govern → enforce. This includes asset discovery, attack path context, posture management, continuous red teaming, and runtime controls.
2) Purpose-built for agentic execution risk.
Akto secures what traditional AppSec and cloud tools miss: prompt-to-tool execution, unsafe action chaining, MCP trust boundaries, excessive permissions, and real-time agent behavior. It was built for systems that act, not just systems that answer.
This shows up directly in the product:
- Akto ATLAS addresses AI Usage Control across employees, discovering every AI app, LLM, agent, and MCP server across the enterprise; enforcing collection-based RBAC over agents and MCP servers; blocking PII, credentials, and prompt injection across every interaction; assigning risk scores to agentic assets; and running 4,000+ adversarial probes continuously.
- Akto ARGUS handles homegrown AI Agent Application Security, maintaining live inventory of agents and GenAI apps across cloud and on-prem, sitting as an MCP Proxy between clients and servers to enforce authentication and tool-level authorization, monitoring decision paths and runtime behavior to catch rogue agents and privilege escalation, and enforcing real-time multimodal guardrails on agent inputs, outputs, and data flows.
3) Security teams can actually operationalize it.
Akto translates emerging AI risk into a program teams can run today. Most AI guardrails filter inputs and outputs. Akto enforces per-action policies across multi-chain agent pipelines, restricting tool calls, data access, hallucinations, and sensitive actions during live execution, and tunes policies from red team findings within the same platform, closing the loop from discovery to enforcement.
In short: Akto is not just another AI security product, it is the operating layer for modern AI security teams.
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