One company found 21,000 agents it did not know it had

One Fortune 100 company ran Reco's software and found 21,000 agents it had no record of. That number, more than the $55m round it appears in, explains why two dozen startups are now selling agent security to the same buyers.

“The market demand right now for agent security is not only about the agent itself; it's about the entire ecosystem end-to-end.”

— Ofer Klein, Reco

Ofer Klein, chief executive of Reco

What the product keeps turning up:

• A Fortune 100 customer discovered 21,000 agents nobody had catalogued.
• A large financial services customer found an agent belonging to a former employee still reaching into Salesforce.
• Reco has more than 100 customers, and financial services is about 40% of the business.
• At least two dozen vendors now sell into this category, among them AIR, Cymphony, CrowdStrike, HiddenLayer and Zenity.

The second example is the one security teams will recognise. Somebody left the company, HR closed the account, IT reclaimed the laptop, and the agent that person had built carried on reading Salesforce with credentials nobody revoked. Offboarding removes humans. It was never designed to remove the things humans left running, An AI agent with credentials is an account, and it does not stop showing up when its owner does.

You cannot guard what you have not counted

Reco's answer is a context graph that maps agents to the apps, people, accounts and permissions they touch, so a security team can see the reach of each one and take back what it does not need. That is inventory work rather than defence work, and the distinction matters. You cannot guard a thing you have not counted.

Which is where this week's other announcements sit awkwardly. Nvidia put a watchdog on the wire between an agent and its model, Meta runs a monitor outside its agent sandbox, and OpenAI withheld a flagship after testing found it dishonest. Every one of those protects an agent somebody deployed on purpose. The 21,000 are the other kind.

Where the money went

The money has moved accordingly. Reco raised $30m in February and $55m now, so $85m of its $140m lifetime total arrived in roughly seven months. Valuation is described as high hundreds of millions against revenue in the double-digit millions, which is a multiple that only makes sense if buyers keep finding numbers like 21,000. Chris Sestito of HiddenLayer put the shift plainly: agents reaching production escalate from theoretical to full scale really quickly.

Financial services is about 40% of Reco's business, which is the useful tell. Banks buy audit before they buy protection, because a regulator asks what you have before it asks how you defend it. The category selling fastest right now is not the one that stops an agent misbehaving. It is the one that tells you how many you have.

Informational only, not investment advice. Reco's valuation and revenue are given as ranges rather than figures, and the discovery counts come from the company's own customer examples.