Washington-based Evoke Security has raised $4 million in a pre-seed round led by Crosspoint Capital Partners, with participation from Red Cell Partners. The funding comes as the startup joins high-profile accelerator programs from CrowdStrike, AWS, and NVIDIA to secure the rapidly expanding “non-human” workforce.
The big picture: As enterprises rush to deploy autonomous agents, security teams are facing a visibility crisis. A single agent can be granted access to email, customer databases, and production code, yet its movements often go unmonitored by traditional security stacks. Evoke addresses this by “turning the lights on,” providing a dedicated governance layer for agents that move across systems at machine speed.
How it works:
- Continuous Discovery: Automatically inventories every autonomous tool, skill, and data source in an environment to eliminate “Shadow AI.”
- Posture Management: Maps potential attack paths and identifies over-permissioned agents before they can be exploited by malicious actors.
- Real-time Response: Deploys via endpoint sensors, browser extensions, and SDKs to monitor agent actions and block risky behaviors—such as data exfiltration—in real-time.
The catch: Evoke is entering a nascent but high-stakes market where the definition of an “agent” is still shifting. While the platform promises deployment in minutes, its long-term success depends on its ability to maintain a lightweight footprint across diverse environments (local, SaaS, and production). As seen in the broader sovereign agent space, there is a fundamental tension between granting agents the autonomy they need to be productive and the restrictive “custom policies” required to keep them secure. If Evoke’s detection engine is too sensitive, it risks breaking the very autonomous workflows that organizations are spending millions to implement. Furthermore, as major security vendors like CrowdStrike inevitably build native agent-monitoring capabilities, Evoke must prove that its multi-platform, cross-vendor oversight offers a level of depth that “all-in-one” legacy security suites cannot replicate.
Key Details
- Funding: $4M (Pre-Seed)
- Lead: Crosspoint Capital Partners
- CEO: Jason Rebholz
- Sector: Cybersecurity / Identity & Access
