SF Bay Area-based startup achieves record traction with AI threat detection and agentic runtime security, landing multiple six-figure and seven-figure deals across D2C, financial services, healthcare, and high-tech sectors

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 25, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Straiker, the agentic-first AI security company, today announced extraordinary market traction less than one year after launching commercial operations. Since beginning sales in March 2025, Straiker has secured global enterprises and leading AI frontier labs with its dual-product approach: Ascend AI for continuous adversarial agent testing and Defend AI for agentic runtime security.

Customers trusted Straiker early, driving 8x growth in just six months through expanded deployments, with multiple six-figure and seven-figure engagements demonstrating urgent enterprise demand for purpose-built agentic AI security. Straiker’s rapid adoption reflects a fundamental shift in how enterprises approach AI security—moving beyond legacy guardrails to comprehensive runtime protection designed specifically for autonomous AI systems.

“When we founded Straiker, we made a contrarian bet: that security and safety will be paramount to enabling autonomous agents in the enterprise,” said Ankur Shah, CEO of Straiker. “The first generation of AI security tools or stitched together platforms were ill equipped to handle security threats for homegrown, coding and productivity agents. What enterprises need is a clean AI-native stack to secure agentic AI. Our customers understood this complexity early, and their trust in us validates that securing agentic systems requires a fundamentally different approach.”

Enabling AI Adoption Across Critical Industries

Straiker’s customer base spans industries where AI adoption carries the highest stakes: frontier labs validating pre-release models before public deployment, direct-to-consumer enterprises managing millions of customer interactions, financial services institutions protecting sensitive transactions, healthcare organizations securing patient data, and high-tech companies defending their own AI infrastructure. The company’s Defend AI product has seen particularly strong growth in the D2C sector, where agentic systems handle customer-facing operations at scale.

“Our research shows the rapid adoption of AI agents, with organizations moving agentic applications into production faster than security tools can adapt. Traditional approaches weren’t built for autonomous systems making real-time decisions, which can proliferate new attack exposures. This gap is creating urgent demand for purpose-built agentic security,” said Melinda Marks, Practice Director, Cybersecurity, Omdia.

“As we expand AI agent capabilities across our platform, runtime security becomes critical. Straiker’s approach to protecting autonomous systems aligns with where enterprise automation is heading,” said Arup Mitra, Sr. Director and Head of Security, Automation Anywhere.

“Our AI assistant interacts directly with millions of customers, making autonomous decisions in real-time. Straiker’s runtime security validates inputs and outputs at production speed, which is critical when customer trust depends on accurate, safe responses,” said a Senior Engineering Leader, Large E-commerce Platform.

Industry-Leading Detection Accuracy Through Continuous Innovation

Detecting agentic threats requires a fundamentally different AI engine than traditional security tools built for simple prompt attacks or data leaks. Straiker’s cutting-edge approach generates millions of behavioral traces and fine-tunes detection models across different agent types—from productivity and coding agents to customer support systems. The result: 98%+ detection accuracy at production-grade speed, powered by proprietary research cited by MSN, Forbes, and leading security publications.

Hypergrowth Team Supporting Enterprise Scale

To support accelerating customer demand, Straiker has expanded from 15 to 40 employees in under 12 months, with strategic hires across AI research, threat intelligence, and enterprise customer success. The company plans continued investment in its security research team to maintain its detection accuracy leadership as agentic AI attack vectors evolve.

Market Context: The Agentic AI Security Imperative

Recent KPMG research highlighted that 42% of surveyed organizations had deployed agents by Q3 2025 – nearly 4x growth in two quarters. However, agentic systems introduce attack surfaces fundamentally different from traditional software—including prompt manipulation, model poisoning, autonomous decision hijacking, and cross-agent propagation attacks. Legacy security tools built for static applications cannot detect or prevent these AI-native threats.

Straiker’s agentic-first approach addresses this gap by providing runtime visibility and control purpose-built for autonomous AI systems, enabling enterprises to adopt agentic AI without compromising security postures.

About Straiker

Straiker secures AI agents through two core products: Ascend AI for continuous adversarial agent testing and Defend AI for agentic runtime security. Straiker protects global enterprises and frontier AI labs, enabling safe AI adoption at scale. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Learn more at straiker.ai.

For more information, visit straiker.ai or follow us on LinkedIn

PR contact:
Shannon Van Every
Force4 Technology Communications
[email protected]

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