Investing in Aurascape: Building the Security Stack for the AI Era
At Menlo, we believe that with every seismic shift in computing comes a new security paradigm—and a new category-defining company to secure it. Just as Palo Alto Networks rose to power in the age of the application firewall and CrowdStrike emerged as endpoint security became critical, the generative AI wave is now creating a new class of security risks—and new opportunities to solve them.
That’s why we’re thrilled to co-lead the Series A in Aurascape, alongside our friends at Mayfield. Aurascape is building a prevention-first platform to secure enterprise AI—starting with a breakthrough approach to visibility and real-time protection across LLMs, embedded AI, and shadow AI tools.
This isn’t just an incremental improvement on existing data loss prevention (DLP) tools. It’s a fundamentally new architecture built from the ground up for how modern enterprises are actually using AI. Aurascape is on a mission to become the foundational AI layer for enterprise AI adoption.
Securing the Next Generation of Enterprise Risk
In our Next $100B Cybersecurity Opportunity post, we outlined how the rise of LLMs, autonomous agents, and AI-embedded applications is creating a new surface area for enterprise risk. Unlike traditional applications, AI tools are inherently probabilistic, multimodal, and often accessed outside of corporate-sanctioned environments. Employees can unknowingly upload sensitive code into a public model or use browser plugins that pass data through unsecured APIs. Existing IT controls—like firewalls or regex-based DLP—simply aren’t built to detect or block these new vectors.
Aurascape’s platform is designed to secure the new AI stack—models, agents, and the unique data pipelines they enable. Aurascape’s approach is prevention-first: a cloud-native, inline proxy paired with an endpoint agent that can decode 1,500+ applications and detect risky AI behavior in real-time, with minimal false positives. Their solution captures activity across text, audio, image, and code—and enables CISOs to set granular, policy-based guardrails without impeding productivity.
This level of context-rich visibility is critical as organizations move beyond experimentation and begin to productionize AI across customer-facing, internal, and autonomous agent-based workflows, allowing Aurascape to become the control plane for securing AI.
Backing a World-Class Team With Enterprise Security DNA
Aurascape’s founding team stands out for their deep expertise and proven track record in enterprise cybersecurity and AI. With leadership veterans from Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, Netskope, Google, and Amazon, the company brings together some of the most experienced minds in security architecture, threat intelligence, and distributed systems design.
This team has built and scaled some of the most widely adopted security platforms in the world, collectively generating over $10 billion in enterprise revenue across their prior roles. Their experience spans architecting operating systems at scale, launching breakthrough data protection tools, and pioneering AI-driven detection systems.
Aurascape is already operating with precision and velocity. The company has filed 14 patents (with two already approved), showcasing both technical originality and speed of execution. Simply put, this is the most experienced team we’ve seen in this emerging category—and one that knows exactly what it takes to build enterprise-grade infrastructure and scale it into a platform trusted by the Fortune 500.
A New Chapter in AI Security
Aurascape represents more than just a compelling investment—it’s a core piece of our broader thesis that AI infrastructure will drive the next generation of cybersecurity innovation. As AI becomes pervasive, every enterprise will need to secure its usage, prevent data leakage, and ensure compliance. Aurascape is uniquely positioned to provide that security fabric.
We’re proud to support this exceptional team to help build the security layer for the AI-native enterprise.
