NeuralTrust raises €17.2M to secure enterprise AI agents

What happened?

NeuralTrust, a startup founded in 2022 in Barcelona by Joan Vendrell (CEO), Victor Garcia (CTO), and Alejandro Domingo (COO), has announced the closing of a €17.2 million (about $20 million) seed round. According to the company, it is the largest seed funding round in cybersecurity raised by a European Union company to date.

The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund, and Finaves, the venture capital fund of IESE Business School. Additionally, NeuralTrust has public funding support from the European Innovation Council and Spain's State Research Agency (AEI).

The company offers a unified platform to identify, secure, and govern all AI agents operating within an organization, from global banks and airlines to energy companies and government agencies.

Why is it important?

The rise of autonomous AI agents is transforming business operations but also introduces unprecedented security risks. NeuralTrust cites a Gartner study predicting that by 2027, 40% of companies will decommission or dismantle autonomous AI agents due to governance gaps detected only after production incidents. Furthermore, Fortune 500 companies are projected to operate over 150,000 agents each by 2028, yet only 13% of firms feel prepared to manage them.

NeuralTrust's platform addresses this problem by providing full visibility into all AI agents in an organization, regardless of how they were built or deployed. Its three main products are:

• TrustGate: a gateway that mediates all calls to LLMs, MCPs, and tools, becoming the single enforcement point through which all agent traffic flows.
• TrustGuard: a runtime security engine that detects and stops threats across all platforms and endpoints where agents operate.
• TrustLens: a posture management layer that identifies every agent in the enterprise and tracks its behavior inside and outside the security perimeter.

The company claims to inspect millions of agent interactions daily, of which approximately 1.2% are malicious and require intervention: attempts to extract data, hijack a tool, or force an agent to violate its rules, detected and stopped in real time.

What consequences will it have?

This funding round will allow NeuralTrust to scale its infrastructure and expand its commercial reach in an exponentially growing market. As more companies adopt AI agents to automate processes, the need for security and governance solutions becomes critical. The startup is well-positioned to become a de facto standard in this niche, competing with tech giants that also offer security tools but with a more specialized focus.

For the Spanish and European entrepreneurial ecosystem, this round is a positive signal: it demonstrates that international venture capital is willing to bet on deep tech startups based in Spain, especially in areas like cybersecurity and artificial intelligence. The participation of funds like Alstin Capital and co-investment from local financial institutions reinforce confidence in Barcelona's tech talent.

However, the security market for AI agents is still nascent and fragmented. NeuralTrust must prove that its platform can integrate seamlessly with clients' existing ecosystems and that its detection and response capabilities are superior to alternative solutions, such as those offered by language model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) or traditional security platforms adding AI capabilities.

What should readers know?

For IT and security professionals, this development underscores the urgency of adopting a proactive approach to AI agent governance. It is not just about protecting data but ensuring agents act within defined boundaries and cannot be manipulated to perform unauthorized actions. NeuralTrust's statistic that 1.2% of interactions are malicious is an indicator that the threat is real and not theoretical.

For investors, NeuralTrust's round validates interest in startups solving security problems at the intersection of AI and enterprise. More opportunities may emerge in this space, especially in areas like regulatory compliance monitoring, agent decision auditing, and protection against adversarial attacks specific to language models.

For the general public, these technologies are invisible but fundamental: they enable banks, airlines, and governments to use AI agents safely, which in turn improves efficiency and user experience. However, it also raises questions about the concentration of power in companies that control AI security infrastructure.

"AI agents are already part of business operations, but the controls protecting them are still catching up. This round allows us to continue building the infrastructure layer that makes AI adoption measurable, governable, and secure," said Joan Vendrell, co-founder and CEO of NeuralTrust.