Berlin’s Cygrid exits stealth with €2.66 million to stop AI agents from accessing confidential company data

Cygrid, a Berlin-based cybersecurity startup, has exited stealth with a €2.66 million pre-Seed funding round for its identity-enforcement platform that controls access to confidential information. 

The funding round was led by Atlantic, the pan-European pre-Seed fund, with participation from D11Z, the venture arm of the Schwarz Group, alongside angel investors including Boris Gorin, VP Product at Zscaler and founder of Canonic Security; Andreas Bermig, CEO of bonify; and Vlad Tropko of AmberVale Capital.

“Dmitry and Dekel are 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. 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,” said Marc-Olivier Lücke, General Partner, Atlantic.

Cygrid was founded in January 2026 by Dmitry Kharchenko and Dekel Paz, both of whom served in the Israeli Military Intelligence. The pair identified a security blind spot created by the rapid proliferation of AI agents inside enterprises, and Cygrid solves this by changing how identity and access management works at the enterprise level.

Unlike conventional identity and access management tools, which grant access at sign-in and stop there, Cygrid enforces limits continuously, checking each action an agent takes and blocking or narrowing it in real time. It also maps human, non-human and AI agent identities into a single intelligence graph, correlating what each identity is entitled to, what it actually does, and on whose behalf it acts. The company argues this approach lets it revoke a forgotten token in seconds and stop a risky AI agent command before it executes.

“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,” said Kharchenko, CEO and co-founder, Cygrid.

In just nine months after incorporation, Cygrid is already serving 19 design partners across FinTech, e-commerce, and SaaS verticals, with six in production. In one early deployment, a Berlin-based D2C company discovered AI agents and third-party app connections its own security team was unaware of, and used Cygrid to remediate more than 100 risky findings.

The fundraise follows a rise in attacks on trusted identities. According to Palo Alto Networks, machine identities now outnumber human ones by 109 to 1, with 79 of those being AI agents. A CrowdStrike report from 2026 found that 82% of cyber detections involve no malware whatsoever; the attackers simply exploited trusted identities such as leaked tokens or compromised agent providers.

With more than 80% of Fortune 500 companies already deploying AI agents and nearly a third of employees using connected agents without organisational approval, according to Microsoft’s Cyber Pulse report 2026, Cygrid sees an urgent, wide-open opportunity.

The startup will use the fresh capital toward expanding its enforcement capabilities, growing its team, and scaling go-to-market operations across Europe. It 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,” added Kharchenko.

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