- NeuralTrust, an AI security company based in Barcelona, raised $20 million in seed funding, led by Munich-based Alstin Capital.
- Gartner warns that by 2027, 40% of enterprises will shut down their AI agents because they only find governance problems after something goes wrong in production.
- NeuralTrust says that 1.2% of all enterprise AI agent interactions are malicious. The company also doubled its total 2025 annual recurring revenue in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
Most large companies do not know how many AI agents are running in their systems. They are often unaware of what each agent is allowed to do, or whether one is being tricked into sending sensitive data outside the company.
NeuralTrust was created in Barcelona to solve this exact problem. Today, it announced a $20 million seed round to speed up its growth in the European enterprise market.
“It’s different if your ChatGPT gives you a wrong answer — you can live with that. But if you connect AI to your email system and it sends emails to outside addresses, leaking internal information, that’s a disaster. The risk grows quickly as soon as customers connect agents and AI to their tools,” says NeuralTrust co-founder and CEO Joan Vendrell to Tech Funding News.
The funding round was led by Alstin Capital from Munich. Other investors included VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund, and Finaves, which is the venture capital arm of IESE Business School. The European Innovation Council and Spain’s State Research Agency also gave public support.
The governance gap enterprises can’t close
NeuralTrust was founded in 2022 by Vendrell, Victor Garcia, and Alejandro Domingo.
Vendrell was previously chief data officer at Mango and also worked at Amazon and McKinsey. Domingo led AI transformation projects as an associate partner at McKinsey before co-founding NeuralTrust. Garcia designed security systems for telecoms and banks. The company now works from Barcelona and London, and will soon open an office in Munich.
NeuralTrust focuses on solving the visibility problem. In large companies, AI agents often multiply without coordination. One team might build a customer service agent on one platform, while another automates back-office work on a different system. Vendor software can also include built-in agents.
Each agent connects to internal systems, databases, and external tools, and acts independently. Most security teams cannot keep track of what is running, and they often cannot stop a rogue agent before it causes harm.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, 40% of companies will shut down or reduce the use of autonomous AI agents because they only find governance problems after something goes wrong in production. By 2028, Fortune 500 companies are expected to run more than 150,000 agents each, but only 13% feel prepared to manage them. The European cybersecurity market was worth over $72 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow by 11% each year until 2033.
How NeuralTrust’s platform works
NeuralTrust’s platform has three main layers that work together.
TrustGate is a gateway that manages every model call, tool call, and model context protocol request. It serves as a single control point for all agent traffic. TrustGuard is a security engine that runs in real time to detect and stop threats on any platform or device, no matter how the agent was built. TrustLens maps every agent in the company and tracks what it does both inside and outside the security perimeter.
The company says it checks millions of agent interactions every day and currently sees an attack rate of 1.2%. This means about one in every 80 interactions involves an attempt to extract data, hijack a tool, or break a policy.
The AI security industry is seeing significant consolidation. For example, Palo Alto Networks bought Protect AI, which had raised $60 million in a Series B round in August 2024, for about $500 million in April 2025. This shows that major enterprise security companies now see AI agent governance as a key feature, not just a minor addition.
NeuralTrust’s positioning as the European specialist matters here: with EU AI Act compliance requirements tightening, several of its government and banking customers are actively seeking providers headquartered outside the US.
“The main competitors come from the US. There are real issues now regarding technological and defence sovereignty in the EU. Some customers — especially governments — are very sensitive about where the technology they buy comes from,” Vendrell notes.
Traction, funding, and what’s next
The company’s growth numbers are unusual for a seed-stage startup. Its customers include Iberia, AirEuropa, Abanca, and Banc Sabadell. NeuralTrust says that 92% of its customers make over $1 billion in annual revenue. In the first quarter of 2026, the company doubled its total 2025 annual recurring revenue, though it did not share exact numbers.
Alstin Capital, which also invests in B2B software companies like VoiceLine and Climatiq, led this funding round.
“AI agents are entering enterprise infrastructure faster than security teams can adapt, so the window to establish control is now. They’ve built a genuine control layer, not another point solution, and enterprises can operationalise it today,” says Alexander Meyer-Scharenberg, partner at Alstin Capital.
The $20 million will be used to hire more engineers, improve integration across the three product layers, and expand throughout Europe. NeuralTrust also plans to enter the US market soon.
The main question raised by this funding round is not whether companies need this kind of solution, but whether they will add it to their AI programs before a major incident makes it necessary. If Palo Alto Networks is willing to pay over $500 million for a competitor, the time for independent specialists like NeuralTrust to shape the market may be limited.
