Earlier this year, Pillar Security co-founder Dor Sarig had big plans for Miami. Having relocated from Israel with his family, he was looking to establish a lasting presence for his AI security startup in South Florida.
“We want to build a real hub here,” Sarig told Refresh Miami in January. “Miami is booming, and the AI talent is strong.”
Less than a year later, Pillar has landed a deal that could dramatically change its future.
San Francisco-based security and compliance giant Vanta has signed an agreement to acquire Pillar for approximately $150 million in cash and stock, according to Israeli technology publication Calcalist, although Vanta and Pillar did not disclose a price in their announcements. The acquisition will bring Pillar’s team of more than 20 employees into Vanta and establish the startup as the company’s Israeli research and development center, Calcalist reported.
The deal represents a significant outcome for a company founded in late 2023 that had raised just over $9 million in funding.
Pillar’s technology addresses a problem that has become increasingly urgent as businesses give AI systems greater independence: Traditional cybersecurity tools weren’t designed for software that can make decisions and take actions on its own.
“AI is software, but it’s a new kind of software,” Sarig told Refresh MIami. “The way we build it and the way we interact with it is completely new. So everything we know about securing software also needs to change.”
Sarig illustrated the problem with an example from Pillar’s work with a Fortune 300 company. After scanning more than 30,000 code repositories, Pillar identified 8,000 AI models and 400 AI systems that the company’s security team hadn’t known existed.
“Those numbers were completely new to them,” he recalled.
Pillar developed technology to identify these systems, test their vulnerabilities, and monitor their behavior in real time. Its researchers have also uncovered serious security flaws in popular AI tools, including a vulnerability in automation platform n8n that potentially exposed hundreds of thousands of enterprise AI systems to takeover, and another in Google’s Gemini CLI.
The company also developed SAIL, an AI security framework that maps 91 risks across seven stages of the AI lifecycle. According to Pillar, the framework has surpassed 50,000 downloads.
For Vanta, which serves more than 20,000 customers and surpassed $300 million in annual recurring revenue earlier this year, acquiring Pillar offers a way to expand beyond compliance management into active AI security.
“Customers, regulators and auditors want proof that a company’s AI does what it says on the tin,” Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo said in the acquisition announcement reported by Calcalist. “A policy document doesn’t get you there. Pillar Security lets companies test their agents and stop them when they go out of bounds, and Vanta turns all of that into evidence.”
In their own announcement, Sarig and co-founder Ziv Karliner reflected on how their early vision had played out. When they launched Pillar, most AI security discussions focused on chatbots. They anticipated a world where AI agents would access data, use tools, and make decisions on behalf of companies.
Now, that world is arriving. Vanta plans to begin integrating Pillar’s technology into its platform in January 2027, starting with tools that identify AI systems across organizations and detect suspicious activity.
Pillar’s founders, Sarig and Ziv Karliner [pictured left to right above], are expected to remain with the company and lead its AI security development.
Photo credit: Eyal Toueg
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