Insider Brief
- Willow, an agentic access governance platform founded by former Wix engineers, has emerged from stealth with $7 million in seed funding led by Hetz Ventures, with angel backing from Wix Co-Founder and CEO Avishai Abrahamiand President Nir Zohar.
- The platform addresses a growing enterprise security gap — with 65% of companies reporting AI agent-related incidents in the past 12 months — by giving organizations visibility and granular control over how AI agents connect to internal systems, supporting tools including Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, and Codex across more than 1,000 pre-built connectors.
- Co-founded by CEO Eyal Ben Ezra, CTO Shalev Shalit, and VP Platform Idan Chetrit, Willow has already deployed its platform internally across more than 5,000 Wix employees and is expanding into enterprise customers across cybersecurity, real estate, and fintech.
PRESS RELEASE — Willow, a pioneering agentic access platform has emerged from stealth with $7 million in seed funding to enable enterprises to safely adopt AI agents across the workplace without impeding innovation. The round was led by Hetz Ventures, following early angel investment from Wix Co-Founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami and President Nir Zohar, who backed Willow at its earliest stage. The funding will be used to enhance the next phase of Willow’s go-to-market while accelerating product development.
With 79% of companies introducing AI agents inside their organizations, and 73% running multi-agent systems, these digital employees are fast becoming a backbone of the modern business. However, speed of agentic adoption has not been matched by proportionate safeguards or governance; leading to misuse, mistakes and unpredictable or damaging outcomes. In one survey from this year, 65% of companies have reported agent-related incidents in the last 12 months. As AI agents become more prominent across enterprises, operating continuously in the background, and gaining access to internal tools, the need for proper oversight and control is paramount.
Willow is tackling this problem head-on; securing enterprises against the fastest-growing and least governed attack vector in the enterprise. Its governance and access layer grants organizations full visibility and control over how AI agents connect to internal systems and what actions they are allowed to perform, overseeing which AI agents employees are already using, monitoring risky or unauthorized integrations, and applying granular controls around how agents interact with enterprise systems and data.
“Currently businesses find themselves in an impossible trade-off: either lock AI down because it can’t be trusted or allow AI agents to operate with unrestrained access to systems and data and hope nothing goes wrong. Willow offers another option,” said Eyal Ben Ezra, CEO and Co-Founder of Willow. “Willow gives enterprises the control needed to adopt AI earnestly without letting it run unchecked. With complete oversight into how any AI agent is deployed, we ensure enterprises control every move an agent makes, narrowing the attack surface exponentially and providing companies with the assurance they need to roll out their AI agents.”
Avishai Abrahami, Co-Founder and CEO of Wix: “Thousands of Wix employees are using AI agents every day, and at our scale, visibility and control over those agents are absolutely critical. To accelerate AI adoption safely, we need guidelines, governance, and full visibility across the company. Willow provides exactly that.”
“The gateway between AI agents and an enterprise’s internal systems is rapidly becoming one of the most overlooked blind spots in enterprise security,” said Guy Fighel, Partner at Hetz Ventures. “What convinced us to lead this round was watching Willow solve the problem inside Wix first, at the scale of thousands of employees, before bringing it to market. Eyal, Shalev, and Idan have built something rare: a governance layer that enterprises actually deploy, rather than another framework that sits on a shelf. They’re the right team to define this category.”
Willow’s platform connects any AI agent (Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini, n8n, custom and more), to any internal system, and includes a marketplace with over 1000 ready to use connectors, over 100 skills and over 100 plugins, all with the authorizations, access controls, audit trails, and governance enterprises require. Willow generates tools at runtime, scoped to the task, detects and governs shadow AI across the organization and runs as SaaS, dedicated cloud, or self-hosted including air-gapped.
Willow brings together former Wix employees across its leadership team, including co-founders Eyal Ben Ezra (CEO), Shalev Shalit (CTO), and Idan Chetrit (VP Platform). Over the past year, the company has worked closely with enterprise design partners including Wix, where the platform has been deployed internally across more than 5000 employees, and is already expanding deployments with multiple enterprise customers in industries like cyber security, real estate, fintech and more.
About Willow (f.k.a Webrix)
Founded by former Wix engineers, Eyal Ben Ezra (CEO), Shalev Shalit (CTO), and Idan Chetrit (VP Platform), Willow is an identity and access platform for enterprise AI agents. The company enables organizations to securely connect AI agents to internal systems with runtime permissions, centralized controls, auditability, and full attribution of agent activity. Willow is headquartered in Herzliya, Israel.
Media contact:
Gavin Horwich
gavin@headline.media
Featured image: Credit: Willow
