Outerlimit, a decentralised security and authorisation platform built for agentic AI, has launched out of stealth with $16m in pre-seed backing, a sum the company says ranks among the biggest pre-seed raises the cybersecurity sector has seen.
AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners and Crane Venture Partners supplied the capital.
A group of strategic angel investors also joined, among them Alan co-founder and CTO Charles Gorintin, who is also a co-founding advisor at Mistral; ReliaQuest founder and CEO Brian Murphy; A-lign founder and CEO Scott Price; Goldman Sachs global head of client coverage for global banking and markets Sam Morgan; FTV Capital partner Kyle Griswold; Twin Track Ventures partner Nicola Sinclair; Garrison founder and CEO David Garfield, whose firm Everfox acquired; and GP Bullhound co-founder and managing partner Manish Madhvani.
The company argues that as businesses hand AI agents access to their data, systems and APIs, today’s tools for identity and access management, runtime enforcement and AI governance fall short. In its view, these methods cannot deliver the verifiable oversight and meaningful control that organisations need to expand agent deployments without taking on unmanageable risk.
Outerlimit brings Zero Trust principles to the point where agents act, which it describes as a first. Instead of holding secrets, keys or credentials in one central store, the platform splits them across the agent ecosystem and only reassembles them when a tool is called. Decryption happens solely once identity, policy and execution context have all been confirmed, so each action receives authorisation before it runs.
The result, according to the firm, shifts Zero Trust from simply checking who an agent is and what it may reach, to deterministically governing what it is allowed to do.
The platform takes customers through three stages. It first discovers agents, tools, MCP servers and shadow AI, then provides verifiable visibility while protecting the integrity of multi-hop chains, before applying deterministic controls to every action an agent performs.
Outerlimit’s founding team includes Tony Pepper and Neil Larkins, the entrepreneurs who steered Egress Software to its 2024 sale to KnowBe4, a Vista Equity Partners portfolio business. They are joined by Dr Peter Vincent, a theoretical neuroscientist who earned his PhD through the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL.
The trio is working on a ground-up rethink of the security architecture that agentic AI demands, with the company stating that each major shift in computing calls for a fresh layer of security infrastructure.
Outerlimit founder and CTO Dr Peter Vincent said, “We’ve spent decades building security systems around human qualities such as loyalty, trust, compassion, and even fear which drive predictable decision-making. In this new agentic era, where agents use reasoning models with access to tools that can impact the world, they simply don’t operate within these human constructs. Agents can change their behavior based on what they read, or how they interact with other agents, while acting at machine speed. Harnessing this powerful intelligence requires a fundamentally new security architecture – one that binds identity, authorization, and action into a single operation at the moment of execution.”
Outerlimit CEO Tony Pepper said, “The demand to deploy agentic AI is unparalleled, but security teams are being asked to sign off on risks they cannot adequately control. Blocking adoption isn’t a strategy, it simply drives the use of unsanctioned AI outside of enterprise oversight. Today’s launch of Outerlimit represents a paradigm shift to securing agentic AI, creating a world where AI agents can be trusted implicitly because every action is provably observed, controlled, and compliant without limiting their expressiveness.”
Vincent added, “The next phase of enterprise AI should not be a race to build the most agents. Instead, success should be measured by the ability of an organization to safely harness the full power of their agent deployments. If intelligence is to become commoditized, trust will be the limiting factor. As we accelerate into a new era of co-intelligence, getting this right is a fundamental obligation for the sake of individuals, organizations, and international security.”
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
