Cyber Startup Pillar Security Raises $9M in Seed Funding to Defend AI with its Own Tech | HackerNoon

The Tel Aviv-based company’s round was backed by a former executive at Microsoft, with its chief executive saying a “new class of protection designed explicitly for AI-related security risks” is needed in the intelligence age.

Pillar’s technology helps enterprises build and run secure AI software, while resolving risks left by traditional DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) tools.

Its end-to-end platform maps all AI-related assets across an organization and tests models and their underlying infrastructure, applications, and agentic layers on which they’re built upon.

The $9m funding round was backed by Shield Capital, Golden Ventures, Ground Up Ventures, and Elias Manousos, a former CVP at Microsoft and CEO of RiskIQ.

Pillar will use the Seed funding to expand its R&D and go-to-market efforts, in response to organisations rapidly building and deploying AI-driven software.

It warned that as AI adoption continues at pace, traditional cybersecurity tools are struggling to keep up, which is leaving critical gaps.

Pillar, which was founded by CEO Dor Sarig, an experienced cybersecurity specialist who worked for the Office of the Prime Minister of Israel, and CTO Ziv Karliner, from Israeli intelligence and IBM, highlighted these gaps in fresh research last month.

Pillar’s research team exposed critical vulnerabilities, including what the company called “Rules File Backdoor” in GitHub Copilot and Cursor; tools which enterprises use to develop apps. Pillar completed responsible disclosure with both GitHub and Cursor.

Dor Sarig, CEO & Co-Founder at Pillar Security told HackerNoon, that as “AI is fundamentally changing the way we build software — it doesn’t just add another step to traditional processes; it introduces an entirely new lifecycle”.

“We are entering the intelligence age, where software has gained agency and data itself has become executable. Pillar’s technology, backed by real-world AI threat intelligence, is built with this understanding, delivering a new class of protection designed explicitly for AI-related security risks.”

He added that Pillar is “redefining application security to match the agentic and autonomous software of the Intelligence Age.”

This comes after a recent Deloitte survey of 1,200 cybersecurity leaders identified major AI-specific risks – including evasion attacks, data poisoning, data privacy, and intellectual property leakage, with 77 per cent of respondents expressing significant concern about these threats.

“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”, Manousos said.

“Enterprise AI adoption can only scale with security and compliance evolving in tandem,” added Nick Chen, Partner at Golden Ventures. “Pillar is a pioneer in defining and provisioning “trust infrastructure” that streamlines and secures AI procurement, development and deployment across the enterprise. Its platform is critical to enable leaders in any industry to drive AI transformation quickly, responsibly and securely.”