September 2 was not only an M&A day in AI security. It was a funding-and-product day that priced two different bets on the same problem: how do you secure AI when every request and every agent action has to be checked?
HiddenLayer raised a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, M12 (Microsoft's venture fund), and Booz Allen Ventures. The Austin company secures agentic, generative, and predictive AI through discovery, supply-chain checks, attack simulation, and runtime protection — now extended to prompt injection, agent manipulation, and malicious tool use. CEO Chris Sestito told TechCrunch annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x over the past year to "tens of millions" of dollars; he declined an exact ARR figure. Over 90% of that growth came from new customers, per the same interview. Post-money valuation: Undisclosed. Prior Series A was $50 million about three years ago. CyberMerge will not invent a mark.
The same calendar day, Lasso Security launched LEAP and announced $30 million in funding. SiliconANGLE's write-up is the clearest product brief: LEAP is a transformer-free AI guardrail that runs on ordinary server CPUs — no GPU required — and returns a verdict in under five milliseconds, with company-stated throughput claims of thousands of times existing guardrails. Benchmarks are Lasso's own. A second engine, RAPID, runs a self-hosted model for the small share of plain-language policy judgment calls; a routing layer keeps most traffic off GPUs. ClearSky led the round; Entrée Capital, iAngels, Singtel Innov8, Mindset, and Swish Data participated. Total capital into Lasso is now more than $37 million. Valuation Undisclosed. Absolute revenue Undisclosed; the company claims more than 500% revenue growth over the past twelve months and cites BMW, eToro, Fiverr, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security among customers.
These are adjacent, not identical, categories. HiddenLayer is selling AI-native runtime and harness security for models and coding agents — the EDR analogy Sestito used in TechCrunch. Lasso is selling cheap, everywhere guardrails so enterprises stop sampling traffic because LLM-as-judge is too expensive. One raises a nine-figure Series B on agentic runtime urgency. The other ships a CPU-only engine and a smaller round on cost and latency. Both refuse to print valuations. Both lean on company-stated growth metrics that buyers should diligence.
Context from the same week sharpens the demand story without inventing TAM. OpenAI designated Astra Critical for cybersecurity capability. CrowdStrike shipped SafeMind and Falcon Guardian. Palo Alto bought Console. Gartner's AI-security spend estimate — $2.83 billion this year, nearly $4.78 billion next, as cited in TechCrunch's HiddenLayer piece — is an analyst forecast, not a CyberMerge model. Use it as coverage context, not as our number.
Underwrite the sheet: HiddenLayer $100 million Series B (Delta-v lead); ARR "tens of millions" and >10x growth (CEO to TechCrunch); valuation Undisclosed. Lasso LEAP + RAPID; $30 million (ClearSky lead); >$37 million total raised; valuation Undisclosed; +500% revenue growth company-stated. Ask for production attach, independent evals, and net retention before you treat either print as category ownership. Capital and product shipped on the same day. The P&L still has to clear enterprise security budgets.