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Pillar Security raises $9M to create AI security guardrails for enterprises

Nancy Dahlberg
Nancy Dahlberg
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Pillar Security specializes in securing AI applications and infrastructure through the entire AI lifecycle, from development to production. The startup has secured $9 million in seed funding to expand its research and development and go-to-market efforts.

Shield Capital led the funding round, with Golden Ventures, Ground Up Ventures and other strategic angel investors participating.

Founded in 2023 by Dor Sarig and Ziv Karliner and based in Miami and Tel Aviv, Pillar security offers end-to-end security across the entire AI lifecycle. The platform is powered by research-driven threat intelligence, helping teams spot, understand, and address security risks with a continuous and automated approach.

“For too long, security has been a reactive afterthought in the face of innovation. This is utterly insufficient for the transformative power of AI. As AI evolves beyond traditional software, with data becoming executable and systems acting autonomously, our security paradigms must fundamentally shift. Security can no longer respond to technological advances – it must be foundational, woven into the very fabric of the AI development lifecycle. This belief drives everything we do,” Sarig, Pillar’s CEO, shared on LinkedIn.

Indeed, a recent Deloitte survey of 1,200 cybersecurity leaders identified major AI-specific risk areas such as evasion attacks, data poisoning, data privacy, and intellectual property leakage, and 77% of respondents expressed significant concern about these threats. What’s more, two in five organizations have already experienced an AI-related security or privacy incident, one in four of which were malicious.

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Pillar seamlessly integrates with existing code repositories, data infrastructures, and AI and machine learning platforms that teams already rely on, and automatically maps all AI-related assets across the organization, including models, datasets, prompts, notebooks and frameworks. Pillar also rigorously tests AI models and their underlying infrastructure, applications, and agentic layers they’re built upon.

In these ways, Pillar deploys customized, adaptive guardrails aligned with each AI application’s unique risk profile and specific business goals, proactively preventing failures before they disrupt operations, while uniting AI teams and security teams around a common toolset.  “We are redefining application security to match the agentic and autonomous software of the Intelligence Age,” said Sariig, who spoke at Miami’s recent Israel Tech Week.

The company reports that it works with leading AI innovators from Fortune 500 companies to tech enterprises such as Similarweb, Eleos Health and AvidXchange.

“As agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed within businesses, hand in hand with an equally burgeoning threat surface, Pillar uniquely understands that securing software in the AI era requires more than incremental improvements. Pillar’s team expertise, together with their holistic security vision, is precisely why we led this investment round,” said Shield Capital’s Elias Manousos, who is a former CVP at Microsoft responsible for AI Copilot for Security and Threat Intelligence and former CEO of RiskIQ.

Pictured at the top of this post: Pillar Security co-founders Dor Sarig, CEO, and Ziv Karliner, CTO. Photo provided by Pillar Security

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Nancy Dahlberg
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