Outerlimit, a decentralised security and authorisation startup for agentic AI, has emerged from stealth with £12 million in pre-seed funding from AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners and Crane Venture Partners. Emerging from stealth today, the round is one of the largest pre-seed rounds ever raised in cybersecurity.
Strategic angel investors also backing the business include Charles Gorintin, Co-Founder & CTO at Alan and Co-Founding Advisor at Mistral; Brian Murphy, Founder & CEO at ReliaQuest; Scott Price, Founder & CEO at A-lign; Sam Morgan, Global Head of Client Coverage, Global Banking and Markets at Goldman Sachs; Kyle Griswold, Partner at FTV Capital; Nicola Sinclair, Partner at Twin Track Ventures; David Garfield, Founder & CEO at Garrison; and Manish Madhvani, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at GP Bullhound.
As enterprises grant agents access to systems, data and APIs, existing approaches to identity and access management, runtime enforcement and AI governance cannot provide the provable observability and effective control required to scale agentic deployments safely. Outerlimit extends Zero Trust to the agent action layer using a distributed architecture and cryptographic enforcement at the moment of tool execution. Rather than storing credentials, keys or secrets in a single location, these are fragmented across the agent ecosystem and can only be reconstructed at the moment a tool is invoked. Decryption occurs only when the required identity, policy and execution context are present and verified, so every action is authorised before it executes. That moves Zero Trust beyond verifying who is acting and what it can access, to deterministically controlling the action an agent is permitted to take.
Customers are taken through a structured pathway to enforcement: discovering agents, tools, MCP servers and shadow AI; gaining provable visibility and preserving multi-hop chain integrity; and then applying deterministic controls to every agent action.
The founding team is made up of cybersecurity entrepreneurs Tony Pepper and Neil Larkins, who led Egress Software to a successful acquisition by KnowBe4, a Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, in 2024, and Dr Peter Vincent, a theoretical neuroscientist with a PhD from the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. Working with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 global brands, Outerlimit operates from offices in London and New York.
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. 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.
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.
We are excited about what Outerlimit is building, which represents a significant opportunity to disrupt and reframe the agentic AI security market. Tony, Neil, and Peter bring a rare combination of deep security expertise and proven founder pedigree. The strength of this funding round reflects our conviction in both the company and the scale of the market opportunity ahead.
