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

WASHINGTON (AP) — The chief financial official for the Pentagon told lawmakers that the estimated cost of the war with Iran is $25 billion.

During a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee, Jules Hurst III, the acting undersecretary of war for finances, said Wednesday that most of that money has been spent on munitions. The military has also spent money on running the operations and replacing equipment.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced questioning from lawmakers Wednesday for the first time since the Trump administration went to war with Iran, a decision that Democrats say has led to a costly conflict of choice waged without congressional approval.

The hearing before the House Armed Services Committee was being held to discuss the administration's 2027 military budget proposal, which would boost defense spending to a historic $1.5 trillion. Hegseth and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dan Caine, are expected to stress the need for more drones, missile defense systems and warships.

Democrats are likely to pivot quickly to the ballooning costs of the war, the huge drawdown of critical U.S. munitions and the bombing of a school that killed children. Some lawmakers may also question Trump's dealings with allies and how prepared the military was to shoot down swarms of Iranian drones, some of which penetrated U.S. defenses and killed or wounded American troops.

“You can win a whole lot of little small battles and lose the war, which is why you don’t stumble into the war in the first place," said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the committee. "As I look at it, the strategy seems to be to use as much violence, as much threats, as much coercion as possible to bend the world to our will. I think that is a very dangerous strategy.”

While a fragile ceasefire is now in place, the U.S. and Israel launched the war Feb. 28 without congressional oversight. House and Senate Democrats have failed to pass multiple war power resolutions that would have required President Donald Trump to halt the conflict until Congress authorizes further action.

Republicans have said they will keep faith in Trump’s wartime leadership, for now, citing Iran’s nuclear program, the potential for talks to resume and the high stakes of withdrawal. Still, GOP lawmakers are eager for the conflict to end, and some are eyeing future votes that could become an important test for the president if the war drags on.

Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, opened Wednesday's hearing by focusing on Trump's call to increase military spending. He pointed to recent increases in defense spending by China, Russia and Iran.

“We don’t have enough munitions, ships, aircraft or autonomous systems to ensure dominance against every adversary," Rogers said. “They are spending more of their GDP on defense than we are.”

Iran's closing of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping corridor for the world's oil, has sent fuel prices skyrocketing and posed problems for Republicans ahead of the midterm elections. The U.S. has responded with a Navy blockade of Iranian shipping and further built up its military forces in the region. Three American aircraft carriers are in the Middle East for the first time in more than 20 years.

The countries appear locked in a stalemate, with Trump unlikely to accept Tehran's latest offer to reopen the strait if the U.S. ends the war, lifts its sea blockade and postpones nuclear talks.

Hegseth has avoided public questioning from lawmakers about the war, although he and Caine have held televised Pentagon briefings. Hegseth has mostly taken questions from conservative journalists, while citing Bible passages to castigate mainstream outlets.

The defense secretary will face a much different dynamic Wednesday as well as on Thursday, when he and Caine also are set to face the Senate Armed Services Committee. Lawmakers' questions are likely to go beyond the budget and even the war to Hegseth's ousting of top military leaders.

Besides Navy Secretary John Phelan's departure last week, Hegseth recently ousted the Army’s top uniformed officer, Gen. Randy George, as well as several other top generals, admirals and defense leaders.

“Tell us why. You know these are important positions. We are in a war posture with Iran,” said North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican.

Tillis, who was a crucial vote to confirming the defense secretary, added that Hegseth’s management of the Pentagon had caused him to have second thoughts on his support.

“He may be able to clean it up, but on its face, you don’t go through the number of highly reputable, senior-level officials, admirals and generals,” Tillis added.

Rep. Austin Scott, a Georgia Republican, condemned George's termination during a House Armed Services Committee hearing last week, saying that “some of us are not through asking the questions about that.”

“I think the firing of Gen. George was an extreme disservice to the United States Army,” Scott said. “And I think it was reckless conduct.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine speaks to members of the media during a press briefing at the Pentagon, Thursday, April 16, 2026 in Washington. (AP Photo/Kevin Wolf)