Cygrid raises €2.66m to stop risky actions by AI agents and tokens

Cygrid raises €2.66m to stop risky actions by AI agents and tokens

22 October 2026: Cygrid, a Berlin identity security start-up, has come out of stealth with a €2.66 million pre-seed round led by Atlantic, with d11z and angel investors including Andreas Bermig, chief executive of bonify, Boris Gorin, vice president of product at Zscaler, and Vlad Tropko of AmberVale Capital. The money goes on building out the platform's enforcement features, hiring and selling across Europe and beyond.

Not yet independently verified. The round rests on Cygrid's own release, and the counts of blocked actions and companies are its own figures; we found no post from Atlantic. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Enforcement after the login

Cygrid starts from the point that most breaches now arrive through an identity that is already trusted: a service account, an OAuth token held by a connected app, or an AI agent with broad access. A login check lets all of those through. Its platform maps every identity in a company, from employees and service accounts to AI agents, into one graph, scores what each should be allowed to do, and acts on the operations themselves, revoking a forgotten token or rewriting or blocking an agent's risky command before it executes.

"Access control tells you who can log in. It says nothing about what they do next," the company says in its release. It runs in production on Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, GitHub, Slack and HubSpot environments, and says it had stopped more than 2,000 risky identity actions at over 20 companies before launch, with design partners in fintech, e-commerce and SaaS. Olga Khorkova, chief technology officer of the pet food company Barfer's, one of the named customers, says it "showed us what each identity could actually do"; the luggage brand Horizn Studios is the other.

Founders and backers

Cygrid GmbH was founded in January 2026. Chief executive Dmitry Kharchenko was chief technology officer at bonify, acquired by SCHUFA, and earlier at Friendsurance and Firelayers. Dekel Paz, chief security architect, led security research teams at Zero Networks, Novartis and LightCyber, later part of Palo Alto Networks. The company says it won a grant from Germany's federal AI Nation programme and was selected for PwC Germany's Responsible AI programme.

"Intelligence-driven enforcement is the only answer that scales," said Marc-Olivier Lücke, general partner at Atlantic. Cygrid is showing the product at it-sa in Nuremberg from 27 to 29 October.

Where it fits

Non-human identities, tokens and agent permissions sit between two established categories: identity management, which governs who has access, and privileged access management, which guards the most powerful accounts. Our identity management software category lists seven products and our privileged access management category 16; Cygrid's pitch is that neither watches what an identity does once its token is valid.

Company profile on TrustList: Cygrid

Sources

• Cygrid: Cygrid raises €2.66M to prevent security breaches caused by stolen identities, 22 October 2026
• Startup.eu: Cygrid, €2.66M pre-seed, 23 October 2026