This $600 Million Startup Is Helping Keep Company Secrets Away From AI Agents

Most people would think twice before giving their bank account details to an AI agent. For enterprises with millions of customers, there’s no chance they’d hand over sensitive passwords.

“Agents are running around like headless chickens inside companies,” says Vlad Matsiiako, CEO of Infisical. “It has so many implications for breaches.”

Matsiiako’s company aims to solve this problem by allowing businesses to use agents without handing over private credentials, like database passwords and cloud-access keys.

Infisical’s fix involves trickery. It provides an AI agent with a fake API key — a password that allows applications to interact with each other — and later substitutes the fake credentials with the real ones through a proxy. “The agent thinks it has a real API key, but it will never even know that it’s not real,” Matsiiako explains.

Founded in 2023, the San Francisco-based startup helps over 1,300 companies like Airbus, Volkswagen and OpenRouter manage sensitive information. Along with storing credentials, it can also update or renew passwords, enable system access for engineers and generate passwords on the fly when an AI agent requests access to a tool or database. By giving agents a one-time password that expires in a couple of minutes, a company can better protect their confidential information in case an agent goes rogue or is part of a cyberattack.

“This creates a much more moving target for an attacker,” Matsiiako says. “We call it dynamic secrets.”

Infisical announced Tuesday that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding at a $600 million valuation. The round was led by prominent AI investor Elad Gil with participation from Gradient and Y Combinator.

“As you have agents doing more and more work on your behalf, you need a platform that can allow agents to have the right set of permissions, but not too much access,” Gil says.

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