A London-based startup which helps mitigate risks and vulnerabilities of businesses deploying so-called AI agents or AI tools that can complete specific tasks has emerged from stealth with a $13m seed round.
The funding round in Trent AI was led by LocalGlobe and Cambridge Innovation Capital, with participation from leaders at OpenAI, Spotify, Databricks, and Amazon Web Services.
The startup, founded in 2015, is tapping into the current trend of AI agent deployment, claiming its product is the first multi-agent security solution designed to secure agents as they evolve. AI agents and autonomous workflows introduce new security risks that traditional security tools were not designed to address, it says.
Trent AI says its product secures AI agents with specialised AI security agents that continuously scan environments, judge risk, mitigate vulnerabilities, and evaluate overall security posture.
The startup was founded by Eno Thereska (CEO), Neil Lawrence (chief scientist), and Zhenwen Dai (CTO), who are former Amazon/AWS and Spotify engineering leaders hailing from academia and research.
Thereska said: “Organisations are deploying AI agents and autonomous workflows faster than their security can adapt, and most development teams using these agents and workflows have no security framework designed for their systems.
“This is not an easy problem to solve. Trent AI is tackling these difficult and important problems, while building the necessary security foundations and frameworks for agentic systems now and through the next decade.”
The startup pointed to Deloitte research showing nearly three in four (74 per cent) companies plan to deploy agentic AI within two years, but that only one in five (21 per cent) report having a mature model for governance of autonomous agents.
Its product is built for developers and security teams that want to develop and ship agents fast without compromising security, it says.
Companies with early access to its product include Canopy and Weblogic.
Trent AI said: “These partners have reported: immediate visibility into their security posture, a security audit report, fast response time identifying and presenting vulnerabilities, a clean and well laid out remediation scope and adaptive feedback.”
The seed funding will support continued development of Trent AI’s security agents, expansion of the engineering team and growth of the company’s design partner and customer bases, it said.