Akto

Akto (akto.io) is a San Francisco-based company founded in January 2022 by Ankita Gupta (CEO) and Ankush Jain (CTO), both former engineers at CleverTap, with prior stints at VMware, LinkedIn, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley. The company raised a $4.5 million seed round in November 2022 led by Accel, with angel participation from Tenable co-founder Renaud Deraison and Sentry CEO Milin Desai, publicly reported by Forbes and Crunchbase. Several data aggregators list additional funding bringing total raised to roughly $11-13M, though no independently confirmed press release for a named follow-on round was found. Public employee counts range from about 22 to 30 as of 2026.

Akto began as an API security platform — automated API discovery, testing for business-logic flaws (the OWASP API Top 10), and inventory management. In 2025-2026 it expanded into agentic AI security, adding discovery of AI agents and MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools across an organization’s infrastructure, automated red-teaming of agentic workflows, and runtime guardrails. Gartner named Akto a representative vendor in its guide for securing AI agents and, per a PRNewswire release, a ‘Pioneer’ in Gartner’s 2026 Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security startup vendors.

Akto’s differentiator is speed and breadth of coverage in discovery — claiming instant API inventories and broad visibility into agent-to-tool actions — packaged as a more lightweight, faster-to-deploy alternative to larger API-security incumbents. As a roughly 25-30-person company, its market footprint is modest relative to the API and AI-security field it competes in, and much of its claimed customer and usage scale is vendor-reported rather than independently audited.