General Analysis Raises $10M in Seed Funding to Secure Agentic AI

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 29, 2026--

General Analysis, a company building security infrastructure for agentic AI, today announced $10 million in seed funding led by Altos Ventures, with participation from 645 Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Y Combinator, and additional strategic investors and angels. The company was founded by former NVIDIA, Cohere, and DeepMind researchers and is working to close a widening security gap as companies race to put autonomous agents into production. General Analysis is already working with enterprise customers in support and finance whose products and workflows are used by hundreds of millions of users.

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In March, General Analysis’s adversarial agent convinced 50 live customer service AI agents to give away more than $10 million in fabricated perks — million-dollar gift cards, years of free home security, whatever it could extract — in roughly three minutes per target. Out of 55 bots tested, only five refused. That kind of stress test, along with the defenses it informs, is what General Analysis runs for enterprise customers before their agents reach production.

General Analysis was founded by Rez Havaei, previously an AI researcher at Cohere and NVIDIA, with Maximilian Li, AI safety researcher from Harvard, and Rex Liu, machine learning researcher at Caltech. The trio built the company on the view that securing AI agents is a distinct technical discipline requiring skills and methods different from traditional cybersecurity. Agentic systems behave non-deterministically, and their failures cannot be anticipated by reading code alone.

Across nearly every industry, enterprises are deploying AI agents into increasingly consequential workflows. The upside is large enough that delaying deployment is often not a serious option, and the burden of making these systems safe has largely fallen on security teams. But there is not yet a mature playbook for securing agentic AI.

Last summer, researchers at General Analysis showed that a widely used Supabase integration in Cursor, a code generation AI agent, could allow an internal agent to be hijacked by a single malicious support ticket, tricking it into leaking a complete private database. Simon Willison, the British engineer who coined the term “prompt injection,” cited the finding as a case of the “lethal trifecta” — an AI system that simultaneously holds private data, ingests untrusted content, and can communicate externally.

Security teams are often stuck choosing between agents that are locked down to the point of uselessness and agents whose risks they cannot actually see. “We hear from security teams that they want agents that are secure by design,” said Rez Havaei, CEO of General Analysis. “What that often turns into in practice is a stack of isolation layers and ad hoc context restrictions that makes a system feel more controlled. Those measures either fail to eliminate the underlying vulnerability or constrain the agent enough to limit its usefulness. The problem is that feeling safer and being safer are not the same thing.”

“Our position is that security for AI systems is an empirical problem. It has to be grounded in rigorous measurement of how those systems behave under realistic and adversarial conditions. You cannot prove an agent is safe," said Maximilian Li, co-founder of General Analysis. "You can only measure how often it fails, and how badly, and drive both numbers down."

From that premise, General Analysis aims to help enterprises configure defenses through realistic empirical measurement. Different defensive layers carry different tradeoffs, and there is no universal configuration that makes every agentic system robust. The company combines adversarial evaluations with a broad defensive toolkit to identify the failure modes present in a deployment, measure the effect of different interventions, and help customers determine which configurations materially reduce risk.

“One advantage of agents is that they are much easier to study systematically than the human workflows they are beginning to replace,” said Rex Liu, co-founder of General Analysis. “Many of those workflows were never especially secure to begin with, and their failures are often hard to observe or improve rigorously. But as those workflows become agentic, they also become more measurable and more improvable — which creates a path for businesses to become more secure in practice than they were before.”

“Agentic systems represent a paradigm shift in security. Safety and security in the AI era demand continuous adversarial testing rooted in deep research, not static rule sets,” said Tae Yoon, Partner at Altos Ventures. “Rez, Rex, and Max are exactly the kind of team this moment calls for: technically brilliant, deeply scrappy, and moving incredibly fast. We’re proud to lead this round and partner with them from the earliest days.”

To get in touch with the General Analysis team, reach out at info@generalanalysis.com.

About General Analysis

General Analysis is an AI security company that helps enterprises deploy agentic AI safely through adversarial evaluation and defensive tooling. Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, the company is backed by Altos Ventures, 645 Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and Y Combinator. Learn more at generalanalysis.com.

About Altos Ventures

Founded in 1996, Altos Ventures is a technology investment firm based in Silicon Valley. Through patient and pragmatic investing, Altos partners with early to growth stage technology companies operating in consumer and enterprise sectors, with the goal of building durable and compounding businesses over decades. As a registered investment advisor (RIA) with the SEC, Altos has a uniquely flexible, long-term, and concentrated approach to venture capital, supporting the full lifecycle of companies from inception to global growth and profitability. For more information, please visit www.altos.vc.

The SF-based startup, founded by former NVIDIA, Cohere, and DeepMind researchers, is working to close a widening security gap as companies race to put autonomous agents into production

AMSTERDAM (AP) — Look up as you enter Amsterdam's new Art Zoo museum, and a 12-foot crocodile stares down at you, mouth open, ready to chomp.

The taxidermic reptile is one of hundreds of preserved creatures on display, alongside artfully arranged piles of bones, illuminated tulips encased in apothecary jars and a cabinet of grotesque fish.

While it’s not a Halloween-themed museum, the show should appeal to anybody looking for something a little dark this spooky season.

“It was a little creepy,” admitted Tomáš Vaško, a Slovak living in the Dutch capital, after touring the museum on a dark October day.

Art Zoo is the creation of Dutch artists Jaap Sinke and Ferry van Tongeren, who draw inspiration from “wunderkammers,” or curiosity cabinets collected by wealthy Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries to showcase objects from the natural world.

“The main thing is that we like storytelling with the animals," van Tongeren told The Associated Press. "We like to add drama. We add an attitude to the animals, where traditional taxidermists just want to mimic nature.”

Behind him, a cheetah slouched in an alcove under the watchful eye of a cassowary.

In natural history museums, animals are posed as they could be seen in the wild. At the Art Zoo, a Japanese giant spider crab stretches its 6-foot legs above a doorway beside the leg bones of a mastodon that nearly reaches the ceiling.

The duo rose to fame in 2015 after shark-pickling artist Damien Hirst purchased their entire exhibition from a London art show.

Unlike at a traditional zoo, the human visitors are confined, not the animals. The display rooms in the 17th-century canal house where the Art Zoo is located are enclosed by brooding, black metal cages.

“We really like the concept of having all the people in a cage and then all the animals free,” van Tongeren says. “In that way, the whole building becomes one artwork.”

None of the animals in the eclectic collection were taken from the wild.

“All our animals come from zoos where they died of natural causes,” said Sinke. Still, he acknowledged that the paperwork can be challenging. The pair primarily obtained specimens from Europe to ensure they know the history of the animals.

Sinke and van Tongeren actually consider themselves an artistic trio, crediting naturalist Charles Darwin as the third contributor to their work. They pitched the concept of the museum as the return of Darwin’s wonder.

In a nod to the man who developed the first scientific theory of evolution, one wall display contains a series of Darwin busts, turned sideways. Sinke and van Tongeren see an amusing irony in honoring Darwin inside a building that once housed the Biblical Museum.

Not everything in the collection is a real animal. Underneath the crocodile suspended from the ceiling is a wall of Jenny Hanivers, ray carcasses modified into grotesque creatures by 16th-century sailors who presented the macabre beasts as real sea monsters to gullible collectors.

Their misshapen faces appear to keep a beady eye on museum guests as they walk from caged room to caged room.

Visitors sit near a collection of bones from a Mosasaurus (70 million years old) at the Art Zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)

A Japanese giant spider crab stretches its legs above a doorway at the Art Zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)

A cheetah slouches in an alcove at the Art Zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)

Dutch taxidermists Jaap Sinke, left, and Ferry van Tongeren pose for a photo at the Art Zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)

A crocodile stares down at the entrance of the Art Zoo in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Oct. 27, 2026. (AP Photo/Patrick Post)