Straiker, an AI security company, has introduced groundbreaking agentic security capabilities in its Ascend AI and Defend AI products, unveiled on August 5, 2025. These industry-first attack and defense agents provide continuous red teaming, real-time guardrails, and full-chain forensics to secure enterprise AI applications against emerging threats like prompt injection and autonomous chaos.
Straiker launches Ascend AI and Defend AI for agentic AI security.
Features continuous red teaming, real-time guardrails, and threat forensics.
Addresses prompt injection, tool misuse, and data exfiltration risks.
75% of tested apps vulnerable to prompt injection, per Straiker’s research.
Integrates with CI/CD pipelines for seamless security assessments.
Backed by $21M from Lightspeed Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures.
Straiker’s Ascend AI and Defend AI tackle the evolving risks of autonomous AI agents, which the 2025 Stanford AI Index report notes were used by 78% of organizations in 2024. Ascend AI’s attack agents autonomously map prompts, tool calls, and data flows, simulating realistic exploit chains to identify vulnerabilities. Defend AI converts these findings into real-time guardrails, neutralizing threats like indirect prompt injection and tool misuse without code changes. “Straiker’s AI-native red teaming quickly adapted to our agentic AI application, enhancing our cybersecurity capabilities,” said Aman Sirohi, CISO at People AI. This unified approach integrates AI, offensive testing, and application security teams, ensuring robust protection across the AI application stack.
Straiker’s solutions offer three core features: Continuous Agentic Red Teaming, which integrates with CI/CD pipelines for ongoing risk assessments; Real-Time Agentic Guardrails, which block emerging threats instantly; and Chain of Threat Forensics, providing detailed traceability for audits and root-cause analysis. “Ascend AI stress-tested our entire agentic AI application stack, uncovering attack paths our manual red teaming exercises wouldn’t have accomplished,” said Dan Garcia, CISO at EnterpriseDB. Straiker’s research highlights that 75% of tested applications are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, underscoring the need for its proactive defenses. The platform’s low-latency, privacy-preserving Straiker AI Engine ensures precise, high-speed protection.
Straiker’s solutions, available on AWS Marketplace, have earned praise for enabling secure AI deployment. A FinTech CISO noted, “We plugged Defend AI in with a few lines of code and saw it apply guardrails across prompt injection, toxicity, PII leakage, and other agentic threats in under a second.” Backed by $21 million from Lightspeed Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures, Straiker is expanding its platform with additional modules to secure the entire AI app lifecycle. “If you can say it, you can spin up an autonomous AI agent and get it to perform tasks. That creative power deserves an equally autonomous defense,” said Ankur Shah, co-founder and CEO of Straiker.
Straiker’s attack and defense agents, supported by its STAR research team, position it as a leader in securing agentic AI applications. By addressing the unique challenges of AI-driven workflows, Straiker empowers enterprises to adopt AI confidently, ensuring safety and resilience in an evolving threat landscape.
Straiker is an AI-native security company that provides cutting-edge solutions to protect agentic AI applications. Founded by AI and cybersecurity veterans and backed by Lightspeed Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures, Straiker helps organizations confidently deploy AI.
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