Companies worldwide are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence (AI) agents to automate tasks, boost productivity, and gain a competitive edge. However, as these AI agents become more autonomous and widespread within organizations, there’s growing concern about their potential to act unexpectedly or maliciously. This is where Bay, a Tel Aviv-based startup, comes in – it has emerged from stealth with $50 million in funding to help enterprises control what their AI agents can do.
Bay was founded by three alumni of the Israeli Military Intelligence (IDF Unit 8200), Yuval Zacharia, Boris Danilovich, and Aner Morag, who bring a wealth of expertise in security and AI. The company’s mission is to provide a single control plane that discovers, understands, and controls AI agents wherever they run within an organization. This means that companies can install and employ AI agents with confidence, knowing they won’t behave erratically or cause unintended harm.
Bay works by automatically building a comprehensive inventory of all AI agents in use, including coding assistants, MCP servers, skills, extensions, and local models. It then maps how these agents interact with each other, identifying potential risks such as combinations of tools that could be used maliciously. The Enforcer component evaluates every proposed action taken by an agent in real-time, deciding whether to allow it, refer it to the user, redirect it based on policy, or simply deny it.
The key innovation behind Bay is its ability to learn from an organization’s activity history and automatically build policies that govern AI agent behavior. This means that companies can trust their AI agents to take autonomous actions without worrying about unintended consequences. By focusing on the agents’ actions rather than trying to prevent them from being compromised, Bay protects against both human-directed prompt injection and organic agent purpose drift.
Bay’s CEO and co-founder Yuval Zacharia emphasizes the importance of effortless deployment, immediate time-to-value, and a clear path to operationalization. The company has developed a flexible, agentless architecture that can be deployed across an entire fleet in under five minutes, allowing customers to see what Bay would have delivered had it been running in their environment. This makes it possible to demonstrate business value almost immediately and complete a proof of value in less than 14 days.
The $50 million funding will be used to further develop the product and expand Bay’s engineering team, as well as invest in go-to-market plans across the US and Europe. Longer-term, the company aims to become the core control layer for enterprises using AI agents at scale, making it possible for organizations to trust their AI agents with increasingly autonomous work.
For companies relying on AI agents to drive innovation and efficiency, Bay offers a much-needed solution to the problem of unpredictable agent behavior. By providing a single control plane that discovers, understands, and controls AI agents, Bay helps organizations avoid the risks associated with unmanaged AI activity. With its innovative approach to AI governance, Bay is poised to become a key player in the rapidly growing market for agentic security solutions.
Source: SecurityWeek — 2026-11-11