2026 WINNER · CYBERSECURITY STARS AWARDS
Akto · Agentic AI Security Platform
Best Agentic Exposure Management Platform
Overview
Akto is the security control plane for AI agents, MCP ecosystems, and the LLMs they depend on. 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 combines 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
Most organizations today have far more AI exposure than they realize.
Security teams may know about a few sanctioned copilots or internal AI projects, but they often lack visibility into:
- shadow AI usage across employee devices and browsers
- internally deployed agents connected to SaaS and cloud systems
- hidden or unmanaged MCP servers
- tool permissions that quietly exceed intended access
- data paths created when agents chain actions across multiple systems
- trust boundaries between prompts, tools, memory, and resources
This is where Akto is fundamentally different.
Akto is not doing generic AI asset inventory. It is modeling the real exposure created by autonomous systems.
What makes Akto best-in-class in Agentic Exposure Management:
1) It discovers the full agentic attack surface, not just "AI apps."
Akto identifies AI agents, MCPs, tools, resources, browser-based usage, endpoints, and connected services, including unmanaged or shadow AI.
2) It understands relationships, not just assets.
Critically, Akto maps relationships, not just assets. Its Agentic Context Graph surfaces how agents, tools, prompts, permissions, and resources interact with one another, because AI risk rarely lives in a single asset; it emerges from how systems chain actions together and where trust boundaries break down.
3) It focuses on exploitable exposure, not passive observability.
The platform then prioritizes based on exploitable exposure: access scope, trust boundary violations, and potential blast radius. Security leaders get a single snapshot covering total agentic assets, successful exploit attempts, sensitive data events, guardrail scores, and compliance alignment across FedRAMP, MITRE ATLAS, CIS Controls, and CMMC, without digging through raw logs.
4) It turns visibility into operational security.
And unlike point solutions that stop at discovery, Akto closes the loop. Teams move directly from exposure analysis into automated red teaming, guardrail enforcement, and posture hardening, all within the same platform.
Akto is differentiated because it gives security teams a true map of the agentic attack surface, and the controls to reduce it before it becomes a breach path.
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