Berlin's Cygrid Raises €2.66M Pre-Seed to Police AI Agents

Cygrid, a Berlin-based cybersecurity startup, has exited stealth with a €2.66 million pre-seed round to build an identity-enforcement platform that controls what AI agents can actually do inside companies — not just who can log in.

Atlantic, the pan-European pre-seed fund, led the round. D11Z. Ventures participated, alongside angels including Boris Gorin, VP Product at Zscaler and founder of Canonic Security; Andreas Bermig, CEO of bonify; and Vlad Tropko of AmberVale Capital.

Why did investors move now?

The funding lands against a backdrop of surging attacks on trusted identities. Palo Alto Networks counts machine identities outnumbering human ones by 109 to 1, and 79 of those are AI agents. A 2026 CrowdStrike report found 82% of cyber detections involve no malware at all — attackers simply exploited trusted identities such as leaked tokens or compromised agent providers.

Microsoft's Cyber Pulse report 2026 adds more pressure: more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies already deploy AI agents, and nearly a third of employees use connected agents without organizational approval.

Marc-Olivier Lücke, General Partner at Atlantic, framed the bet in one line: "AI agents are widening the identity attack surface faster than any control can keep up. Intelligence-driven enforcement is the only answer that scales. The timing for Cygrid couldn't be better." He also called founders Dmitry Kharchenko and Dekel Paz "proven builders who combine deep cybersecurity experience with a real understanding of what enterprises need: security that stops the wrong action without slowing the business down."

How does the platform work?

Conventional identity and access management grants access at sign-in and stops there. Cygrid enforces limits continuously. It checks each action an agent takes and blocks or narrows it in real time. The platform also maps human, non-human and AI agent identities into a single intelligence graph, correlating three things per identity:

• what it is entitled to do
• what it actually does
• on whose behalf it acts

The company says this lets it revoke a forgotten token in seconds and stop a risky AI agent command before it executes.

Kharchenko, CEO and co-founder, puts the gap bluntly: "Access control tells you who can log in. It says nothing about what they do next. Every identity in an enterprise can act, and once a token is valid, not one control in the stack can stop the action. Cygrid is the platform that does: it decides what each identity may do and enforces it before anything executes."

Who is already using it?

Nine months after incorporating, Cygrid serves 19 design partners across FinTech, e-commerce and SaaS, with six in production. In one early deployment, a Berlin-based D2C company used Cygrid to discover AI agents and third-party app connections its own security team didn't know existed — and then remediated more than 100 risky findings.

That number is the pitch: companies don't fully know what's acting inside their perimeters.

What's next?

Cygrid was founded in January 2026 by Kharchenko and Dekel Paz, both veterans of Israeli Military Intelligence. The pair spotted the security blind spot created by the rapid spread of AI agents inside enterprises and built the platform to change how identity and access management works at the enterprise level.

The fresh capital will fund expanded enforcement capabilities, team growth, and go-to-market scaling across Europe. Cygrid explicitly aims to become the European alternative to US and Israeli providers of AI identity security.

"This funding allows us to scale that approach and help organisations move from reactive identity security to continuous, real-time enforcement, so they can adopt AI agents at full speed without losing control of what those agents can do," Kharchenko said.

With machine identities multiplying faster than controls and European buyers looking for a homegrown option, the €2.66 million round positions Cygrid to define a category legacy IAM vendors haven't yet claimed.