The startup maps how identities, assets and vulnerabilities connect, and uses AI agents to find and fix risky combinations of security gaps
Northstar Security, a startup building AI agents for security teams, has come out of stealth with $7 million in seed funding. Wing Venture Capital led the round. MVP, Outliers and cybersecurity veterans Gerhard Eschelbeck, Renaud Deraison and Justin Somaini also invested. The company will use the money to develop its platform, hire staff and expand its go-to-market push.
Northstar is built around a problem security teams know well: issues that look manageable on their own can become dangerous when they overlap. A vulnerability, an unmanaged device or an account with excessive privileges may each seem under control, but together they can expose critical business systems. Northstar calls these “toxic combinations” and designed its platform to catch them.
To do this, the platform pulls data from a customer’s existing security and IT tools and builds what the company calls a Security Context Graph. The graph is updated in real time and shows how identities, assets, applications, vulnerabilities and business systems connect to one another. As an example, the platform could flag a laptop without endpoint protection that belongs to a privileged user with access to a critical payroll system.
Analysts can look into findings like this by asking questions in plain language. Northstar’s AI agents can then start fixes, such as installing endpoint protection, notifying the user or limiting their access. People can supervise those actions where appropriate.
Customers can also connect external AI agents to the graph through Model Context Protocol (MCP) and build their own security workflows. Northstar says it integrates with more than 70 enterprise security and IT products, including Okta, GitHub, Workday, Microsoft Defender and Entra, AWS and Google Cloud.
“Security teams are drowning in data but starving for context,” said Amer Deeba, Northstar’s CEO and co-founder.
Deeba previously co-founded Normalyze, which Proofpoint later acquired, and was a senior executive at Qualys. His co-founder and CTO, Ed Rowe, held the same role at Farmers Business Network and led engineering as an SVP at AppDynamics.
