Hush Security Raises $30M to Close AI Agent Governance Gap

Hush Security, an Israel-based cybersecurity firm specializing in securing machine identities, has today announced it has completed a Series A investment round worth $30 million. Akamai Technologies has become a new strategic investor, joining current investors Battery Ventures and YL Ventures, who have also upped their stake in the startup. With this investment round, Hush’s total raised capital increased to $41 million, quite an achievement for a relatively young company that was founded just under a year ago.

Why This Round Is Important

The timing of the round matches the increasing pain point facing most enterprises in terms of their IT infrastructure: autonomous AI agents are multiplying faster than anyone’s governance framework can manage. According to research cited by the company, in 2028, the average Fortune 500 company will deploy more than 150,000 AI agents, compared to fewer than 15 just a year earlier (PR NewsWire).

Now, an increase like this would be nothing to worry about, except that most companies don’t have the capability to handle it. Omdia research quoted by Hush revealed that 96 percent of organizations are governing their AI agents via a governance framework that wasn’t designed for such software.

Most of the time, AI agents work inside systems, making decisions and actions without any external intervention, and, in most cases, companies have no idea what AI agents they have, what those agents have access to, and who is responsible in case of any problem with an agent. This is where Hush steps in to solve the problem.

What Hush Really Does

In contrast to other cybersecurity solutions that use standing credentials like API keys and static secrets, which provide endless access in case of leakage or misuse, Hush enrolls all AI agents in its platform to create a registry. From there, it removes all default standing access rights and assigns scoped and just-in-time permissions only in case an agent needs to make an action. Every action of every agent gets logged, and, at any time, an administrator can turn off the agent using a centralized kill switch.

In terms of expanded capabilities for the agentic workforce, Hush Security platform has three main features:

Discovery: mapping all AI agents used in the organization, including desktop assistants, enterprise-deployed agents, and shadow AI. In addition to this, it maps the tools, resources, and integrations available to the agent, such as MCP servers.

Control: centralized governance that registers all agents, maps them according to existing permissions frameworks, and limits them to the least access possible, providing just in time provisioning and kill switches.

Audit: maintaining full records of all actions performed by all agents.

Investment from Akamai and Current Investors

Investing in Hush is a noteworthy move from Akamai, considering the long-standing experience of the company in enterprise cybersecurity and enterprise content delivery infrastructure. Ramanath Iyer, Akamai’s Chief Strategist, explained that the move was dictated by the fact that identity is the aspect of cybersecurity that many enterprises fail to get right with the appearance of AI agents.

As for now, Kyndryl, the world’s largest IT infrastructure services provider, has implemented Hush into its operations and started selling the platform to other enterprises it works with. According to Adeel Saeed, SVP and CTO of Global Cyber Resiliency at Kyndryl, the collaboration with Hush stems from a common understanding of the importance of having control of identity as a way to manage an autonomous workforce.

Hush Security’s current investors agreed to continue investing because of the following reasons. As stated by Yoav Leitersdorf, Founding Partner at YL Ventures, the original premise of machine identity has become even more relevant because of AI agents becoming a core component of the workforce in enterprises, and participation of Akamai emphasizes that an identity gateway for AI agents is going to become a crucial piece of infrastructure. Barak Schoster, Co-founder and General Partner at Battery Ventures, expressed similar thoughts, stating that enterprises have been giving actual power to autonomous software via standing credentials that Hush originally set out to eliminate.

Future Plans for Hush

According to the company, it will use the raised capital to expand engineering and sales teams and focus on the US market, as well as improve integration with enterprise identity and access management (IAM) systems and the ecosystem of agentic AI and continue growing partnerships with corporations.

Founded by veterans of Meta Networks (acquired by Proofpoint in 2019), Hush Security has positioned itself around a simple yet urgent idea: in times when software is acting on its own inside enterprises’ systems, treating AI agents with standing credentials won’t work anymore. Whether this idea will prove to be sustainable is yet to be seen, but, with Akamai as a new investor and Fortune 500 enterprises as current customers, Hush seems to position itself as a leader in the emerging and rapidly growing category of cybersecurity solutions.

TheTweaks Verdict

According to the TheTweaks Verdict, $30 million Series A investment rounds are not a rarity, but a strategic investment from Akamai, a company that has long experience in enterprise security infrastructure, is a reason to pay attention. The numbers of AI agents are growing fast now, with an expected jump from 15 to 150,000 per Fortune 500 company in a year’s time, and it’s a big problem considering that 96 percent of organizations have governance frameworks that weren’t designed for autonomous software. In these conditions, Hush’s idea of killing standing credentials and logging everything becomes quite relevant. That said, this is still a rather young company that is operating in an emerging category and is going to face competition soon.