# Upwind Acquires Aegis to Build Dedicated AI Security Labs

> Upwind acquires Aegis to launch AI Security Labs, a new division focused on protecting enterprise infrastructure from AI agents, plugins, and credential harvesting.

- Canonical URL: https://coreiten.com/en/article/upwind-acquires-aegis-to-build-dedicated-ai-security-labs
- Language: en
- Section: Security
- Author: Sami
- Published: 2026-09-23T20:05:18+03:00
- Modified: 2026-09-23T20:05:18+03:00
- Publisher: CoreITen (https://coreiten.com)
- Keywords: Upwind acquires Aegis, Upwind AI Security Labs, Aegis, Omri Limor, Saar Ankonina, AI agents, API keys

## Summary

Cybersecurity firm Upwind acquired AI security startup Aegis to launch Upwind AI Security Labs, tackling the rising threat of AI-generated attacks.

- Aegis co-founders Omri Limor and Saar Ankonina, alumni of Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence division, will lead the new research initiative.
- The newly formed division currently operates with 12 developers and researchers.
- Upwind plans to scale the team to 25 personnel within the next three months, targeting a total of 35 members.
- The initiative focuses on three core security vectors: agent and plugin monitoring, secret scanning, and attack detection.

**Why it matters:** This acquisition highlights the critical industry shift toward securing autonomous AI agents and machine-to-machine interactions instead of traditional human endpoints.

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Cybersecurity firm Upwind has acquired AI security startup Aegis to launch a dedicated research division focused on defending against AI-generated attacks. The newly formed Upwind AI Security Labs will target the growing vulnerabilities surrounding AI agents, skills, and plugins that interact with enterprise infrastructure. The acquisition integrates Aegis’s specialized threat detection technology directly into Upwind’s existing cloud security platform.

Aegis co-founders Omri Limor and Saar Ankonina, who began their careers in Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence division, will lead the new initiative. Their previous work at Aegis centered on mitigating autonomous exploitation pipelines and large-scale credential harvesting - threats that have lowered the traditional skill barriers for cyberattacks. The two companies initially explored a strategic partnership before finalizing the acquisition.

> We initially built Aegis as a startup to tackle the missing security layer around AI agents, skills and plugins.
>
>  - Omri Limor, Co-Founder, Aegis

### Securing the AI Infrastructure Layer

The integration of Aegis’s technology into Upwind’s runtime platform aims to accelerate the transition from threat research to active enterprise defense. Upwind AI Security Labs is specifically engineering defenses for the expanding ecosystem of autonomous tools that execute tasks and access sensitive data.

The research and development initiative will focus on three core security vectors:

- **Agent and Plugin Monitoring:** Tracking how AI agents interact with applications and identifying malicious inputs introduced through third-party skills.
- **Secret Scanning:** Detecting compromised API keys and session tokens both in transit and at rest to prevent large-scale harvesting.
- **Attack Detection:** Building runtime defenses against AI-generated attacks that leverage frontier models to bypass traditional security filters.

The new division currently operates with 12 developers and researchers. Upwind plans to aggressively scale the team to 25 personnel within the next three months, with a target of 35 members as the research scope expands.

### The Race to Secure Autonomous Workflows

Upwind's acquisition of Aegis highlights a critical pivot in cloud security: the attack surface is rapidly shifting from human endpoints to machine-to-machine interactions. As enterprises deploy autonomous AI agents with read/write access to internal databases, the traditional perimeter dissolves. These agents rely heavily on API keys and session tokens, making them prime targets for automated credential harvesting.

By absorbing Aegis before it scaled as an independent vendor, Upwind is signaling that standalone AI security tools are destined for rapid consolidation. Enterprise security teams are already suffering from tool fatigue; they do not want a separate dashboard for AI agent monitoring. Integrating this missing security layer directly into a broader cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) gives Upwind a distinct architectural advantage over competitors still treating AI risks as a future problem.

## Sources

- [thenextweb.com](https://thenextweb.com/news/upwind-acquires-aegis-ai-security-labs)

## Related topics

- [AI Agents](https://coreiten.com/en/topic/ai-agents)