Insider Brief
- Onyx Security launched with $40 million in funding from Conviction and Cyberstarts to develop a secure control platform for managing autonomous AI agents in enterprise environments.
- The company’s platform monitors AI agent activity, evaluates reasoning steps, and can approve, block, or redirect actions to enforce security and governance policies.
- Founded by cybersecurity and AI specialists Maxim Bar Kogan and Gil Elbaz, Onyx aims to help enterprises safely scale AI agent adoption while reducing risks from errors, misuse, and cyberattacks.
PRESS RELEASE — Onyx Security, the company building the secure AI control plane for the agentic era, announced its launch and $40M in funding from Conviction and Cyberstarts.
AI agents are quickly becoming the backbone of how companies operate. Employees are introducing increasingly autonomous AI agents to transform work across departments, from engineering to customer service. However, the unpredictable nature of agents creates a new operational risk for enterprises, as reasoning errors and hallucinations can lead to unintended actions. AI agent adoption also creates a fast-expanding attack surface that can be manipulated by attackers with specially crafted prompts. Traditional security solutions built for predictable applications and human-driven workflows simply cannot see or control these new “digital employees.”
To help companies face this new risk, Onyx is building the first secure AI control plane to oversee autonomous AI agents and enable their safe and rapid adoption across the enterprise. The company’s unified platform continuously discovers AI agents, monitors each step of their reasoning, and approves or corrects agent actions — ensuring enterprises are able to enforce security and governance policies.
“Every enterprise is becoming an agent operator — whether they planned to or not,” said Maxim Bar Kogan, Co-Founder and CEO of Onyx. “Agents are given access to the most critical systems in the enterprise, but what are our guarantees they will not make serious mistakes or get compromised? How do we decide what systems are off limits for agents, or what are the requirements to access them? The safe adoption of AI agents requires security from attacks, as well as ensuring agents don’t make critical mistakes.”
Onyx delivers value across multiple departments within the enterprise from a single platform. Security teams get much-needed visibility, posture management, and runtime protection; governance teams easily satisfy security standards and regulatory requirements; infrastructure teams can more easily support AI agents and MCPs while optimizing for cost, accuracy, and latency. With Onyx, executives can measure AI adoption, set goals, and track attainment to promote responsible innovation.
Onyx is powered by its own set of supervisory agents and proprietary AI models, developed to understand AI reasoning and intervene in real time — blocking actions, requiring human approval, or steering the agent in a different direction — turning autonomous agents into governed participants in enterprise workflows.
“Maxim and Gil saw the need for an AI control plane before the market did,” said Sarah Guo, Founder of Conviction Partners. “While most of the industry was still focused on data loss in chatbots, they predicted that the risk surface of agents was going to be critical. Onyx is the control plane all enterprises will need as they scale to thousands of agents.”
“The shift of organizations toward a world in which AI systems become part of their operational infrastructure creates an entirely new attack surface,” said Hila Zigman, Partner at Cyberstarts. “These are not just software tools to be protected — they are systems that make decisions, access sensitive information, and are integrated into critical business processes. From the very first moment, it was clear to us that Maxim and Gil understand the depth of this change and are building a solution designed for the AI era, rather than trying to adapt legacy tools to a new reality. We believe the Onyx team is exceptionally well-positioned to become a market leader in AI security for large enterprises.”
Co-founders Maxim Bar Kogan and Gil Elbaz bring the multidisciplinary expertise necessary for solving this problem. Bar Kogan is a cybersecurity leader and experienced technology executive who served in Unit 8200 of the IDF. Elbaz is a veteran AI researcher, previously reporting to the CTO of Nvidia, and a former member of one of the IDF’s AI research units.
Onyx already counts multiple Fortune 500 companies as customers, and has over 70 employees across Israel, the United States, and Canada. The funding will be used for expanding product and engineering teams, developing new AI models, and scaling go-to-market efforts to meet increasing demand for a secure AI control plane.
About Onyx Security
Onyx Security accelerates enterprise AI adoption, securely. The company’s secure AI control plane offers a single platform to serve security, governance, and infrastructure teams as they oversee how AI agents are used, ensure they are secure and compliant, and measure their effectiveness. Powered by its proprietary models and agentic technology, Onyx is already trusted by leading Fortune 500 companies. To maximize the value from AI and minimize the risks, visit onyx.security.
Contacts
Mark Loewenstein
mark@onyx.security
