Pillar Security

Cybersecurity · AI Security · Compliance

Acquisition

Vanta to acquire Israeli AI security startup Pillar for a reported $150M

The deal fits a 2026 wave in which AI-agent security acquisitions already outnumber all of last year's by four to one.

• Vanta signed a definitive agreement to acquire Pillar Security in a deal reported at about $150 million in cash and shares; Pillar will become Vanta's Israel R&D center.
• Pillar, founded in 2023 by Ziv Karliner and Dor Sarig, discovers, tests and secures AI agents across their lifecycle and blocks unauthorized actions at runtime.
• Pillar had raised just $9 million total, including an April 2025 seed round led by Shield Capital, making the reported price roughly 16 times its total funding.
• Vanta plans to roll Pillar's tools in through 2027: AI inventory and runtime monitoring in January, adversarial red-teaming in spring, and runtime enforcement in summer.
• Vanta's own research found 65% of IT and business leaders say their use of agentic AI is outpacing their understanding, while only 48% have a framework for limiting agent autonomy.
• It's Vanta's third acquisition and part of a 2026 surge in AI-agent security M&A, with 40 such deals in the first three quarters versus 10 in all of 2025, including CrowdStrike's roughly $495 million buys of Fiddler AI and Dreadnode and Cyera's reported $1 billion deal for Oasis Security.
• As AI agents move from answering questions to taking real actions inside companies, compliance platforms are racing to pair written policy with runtime enforcement that can actually prove controls work.