When AI goes Rogue, Straiker is All you Need

As AI systems start thinking, deciding, and acting on their own, Straiker is quietly building the first real AI-native security platform for an autonomous future.

Imagine this.
An over-privileged AI assistant can book a flight, leak your financial data, and recommend unsafe changes to someone’s medical treatment—without malicious code, and without a single hacker involved.

This isn’t science fiction. This is agentic AI—autonomous, decision-making systems that act without direct human input. And it’s already being deployed in industries like finance, healthcare, and SaaS.

With Agentic AI, anyone can build and consume Apps using natural language and so can malicious actors to create autonomous chaos. But as this technology accelerates, one question is becoming impossible to ignore:
Who’s keeping an eye on the AI?

That’s exactly the problem Straiker was built to solve.

Born for the Moment AI Broke the Rules

Straiker didn’t evolve from a legacy security company trying to pivot into AI. It was founded at ground zero of the AI shift, with a single idea:
Tomorrow’s risks won’t look like today’s.

“In the age of agentic AI, failure isn’t a 404 error,” says Sreenath Kurupati. “It’s a hallucination that acts. It’s a prompt that spirals. It’s an AI agent doing something you never told it to do—but something that technically makes sense to it.”

And the scariest part? Most organizations still have no way to catch these failures in real time.

Straiker’s mission is to change that—before autonomous chaos becomes our new normal.

Not AI-Ready. AI-Born.

What sets Straiker apart? It wasn’t retrofitted for AI. It was designed for it.

Legacy cybersecurity was built to block files, filter IPs, and look for patterns in static code and data patterns. But agentic AI doesn’t follow static rules. It adapts, it reasons, it makes decisions. You need security that can understand behaviour, not just code.

That’s why Straiker developed its “Medley of Experts”—a fleet of fine-tuned mini-models that act like security analysts inside your AI systems. They monitor everything from agent manipulation to tool misuse and stealth prompt injections.

This isn’t “flag the odd keyword” detection. It’s Perceptual AI—real-time, high-precision threat modeling that catches the kinds of vulnerabilities only language-based systems can introduce.

Two Flagship Products, One Smart Loop

Straiker’s security architecture powers two products:

Ascend AI, a dynamic red-teaming engine that simulates attacks on your agentic applications—probing for weaknesses, unexpected behaviors, and emergent threats before anyone else can exploit them.
Defend AI, a real-time enforcement layer that detects and blocks unsafe actions instantly—whether it’s a hallucinated command, a sensitive data leak, or an indirect injection cloaked in polite language.

Together, they form a closed-loop system that learns, protects, and evolves as your AI does.

The best part? You don’t need to change your code. Straiker works without modifying agent architecture or slowing down development velocity.

So, Who Needs Straiker Right Now?

In short—anyone letting AI do real work needs Straiker.

But several sectors are especially at risk:

Financial Services: Multi-agent workflows touch personal data, investment decisions, and customer accounts.
Healthcare & Life Sciences: Hallucinations or data exposure can have life-altering (or life-ending) consequences.
Retail & SaaS: Copilots, recommendation engines, and AI-powered customer interactions are already live.
AI-First Startups: Fast movers building greenfield agentic apps who want to ship safely without slowing down.

For Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), Straiker Is a Flashlight in the Dark

Security leaders are facing an unfamiliar challenge: How do you defend a system driven by emergent, non-linear behavior?

Straiker equips Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Application Security (AppSec) teams with:

Full observability across prompt chains, model calls, and system actions
AI-native guardrails that detect and neutralize threats as they emerge
Risk mapping across the entire AI lifecycle—from chatbot to copilot to full-blown autonomous agent

And it does this without breaking anything—no model retraining, no dev friction, no delays.

As one CISO put it after a demo: “It’s the first AI security tool that actually understands what the AI is doing.”

Built Responsibly, Backed Boldly

Straiker isn’t just building fast—it’s building responsibly.

There’s no training on customer data, and the guardrails it deploys are transparent, auditable, and testable. The Medley of Experts is designed not just for speed, but for trust.

And investors are paying attention. The company recently secured $21 million in seed funding, not to grow wide—but to go deep. Its go-to-market strategy is precise: work with early adopters, refine quickly, and own the category of AI-native security.

Meet the Minds Leading Straiker

Ankur Shah, Co-Founder & CEO, is a seasoned cybersecurity executive who scaled Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud before pivoting to build Straiker from the ground up. Alongside him, Sreenath Kurupati, Co-Founder & CTO, brings two decades of AI and security innovation to architect the “Medley of Experts.” Together, they blend deep technical expertise with entrepreneurial grit to keep AI safe.

The Bigger Vision: Securing a World Where Agents rebuild the App Economy & the Internet

Straiker isn’t just responding to a wave.

It’s surfing the tsunami.

Over the next 12–18 months, the company is doubling down on agent-first security—because that’s where enterprise is headed. In tomorrow’s systems, there will be no traditional software to exploit. Only intelligent agents, reasoning and interacting across infrastructure.

And if those agents are compromised—or confused—the outcomes could be catastrophic.

Straiker calls this new threat category LAVA: Language-Augmented Vulnerabilities in Applications.

Most businesses don’t even know LAVA exists. But Straiker is already pouring concrete over it.

“Our mission is to secure the future so that the enterprises can focus on imagining it.” – Ankur Shah

AI agents will soon run customer service, financial systems, R&D, and even code deployment. The question isn’t if we should secure them. It’s how fast we can catch up.

Straiker is betting that the companies who thrive in the AI age will be the ones who can innovate with confidence—because their systems are secured at the speed of intelligence.

And they’re here to make sure that future isn’t just powerful but protected.