In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders, Nick Warner, co-founder and chief executive officer of Neo Security, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how agentic software is dismantling the assumptions behind traditional threat detection. Warner, a longtime security veteran from his years at SentinelOne, explains that legacy endpoint detection relied on predicting normal software behavior to flag anomalies — a model that breaks down once the software itself becomes agentic. He details Neo's approach to mapping the agentic software universe through what the company calls the Neoverse, using AI-driven research to identify malicious skills, tools and extensions at a pace no human research team could match.
The conversation also explores why open-weight models are reshaping cybersecurity economics, offering cost efficiency, on-device portability and fine-tuned specialization for threat detection. Warner unpacks Neo's decision to build an endpoint sensor rather than a cloud-only platform, capturing context and intent at the exact moment humans interact with AI. He points to Gartner projections showing agentic applications growing from 5% of enterprise software in 2025 to 40% by year's end and 100% by 2030, underscoring the urgency behind Neo's channel-first go-to-market strategy. Having raised $100 million from investors including a16z and Bessemer, Neo is now scaling across engineering, sales and go-to-market teams. From Skills-based threats that didn't exist before December to the blurring line between IT and IT security, Warner outlines why organizations need a new control surface built for the agentic era.
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Nick Warner, Neo Security
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders, Nick Warner, co-founder and chief executive officer of Neo Security, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how agentic software is dismantling the assumptions behind traditional threat detection. Warner, a longtime security veteran from his years at SentinelOne, explains that legacy endpoint detection relied on predicting normal software behavior to flag anomalies — a model that breaks down once the software itself becomes agentic. He details Neo's approach to mapping the agentic software universe through what the company calls the Neoverse, using AI-driven research to identify malicious skills, tools and extensions at a pace no human research team could match.
The conversation also explores why open-weight models are reshaping cybersecurity economics, offering cost efficiency, on-device portability and fine-tuned specialization for threat detection. Warner unpacks Neo's decision to build an endpoint sensor rather than a cloud-only platform, capturing context and intent at the exact moment humans interact with AI. He points to Gartner projections showing agentic applications growing from 5% of enterprise software in 2025 to 40% by year's end and 100% by 2030, underscoring the urgency behind Neo's channel-first go-to-market strategy. Having raised $100 million from investors including a16z and Bessemer, Neo is now scaling across engineering, sales and go-to-market teams. From Skills-based threats that didn't exist before December to the blurring line between IT and IT security, Warner outlines why organizations need a new control surface built for the agentic era.
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Cyber Security Leaders, Nick Warner, co-founder and chief executive officer of Neo Security, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how agentic software is dismantling the assumptions behind traditional threat detection. Warner, a longtime security veteran from his years at SentinelOne, explains that legacy endpoint detection relied on predicting normal software behavior to flag anomalies — a model that breaks down once the software itself becomes agentic. He details Neo's approach to mapping the agentic software ...Read more
exploreKeep Exploring
What does Neo focus on, and what motivated its creation?add
How is the emergence of agentic AI (swarms of agents) changing the security landscape, and how should companies adapt their security posture?add
How long would it take to train a specialized researcher (a resource person) to become fully effective at analyzing Skills—understanding what they do and whether they are malicious?add
How are you working with channel partners to deliver ongoing security services and new controls as traditionally non-AI software becomes agentic, and is there a new playbook or value equation for engaging customers (CIOs/CTOs) around this opportunity?add
What is the company's current status, including funding, hiring/growth, and its vision for agentic software?add
>> Palo Alto Studio Connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Nick Warner
>> I'm John Furrier, co-hosting theCUBE here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.
John Furrier
>> Well, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in theCUBE's NYSE studio, of course, with our Palo Alto Studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. All the deep tech coverage here and in Palo Alto. It's our Cyber Security Leaders series. We talk to the leaders who are making it happen. Startups, the new innovations around AI and AI infrastructure continues to accelerate and enable more use cases and new opportunities. Nick Warner, co-founder and CEO of Neo Security, veteran in the space. Nick, thanks for coming into theCUBE.
Nick Warner
>> Happy to be here, John.
John Furrier
>> Good to see you. You have a lot of roots in security at SentinelOne, among other things. Yeah. You're back at it with your fast-growing startup. Yeah. Neo.
John Furrier
>> Neo.
John Furrier
>> I think of The Matrix when I break down Neo. It's like, okay, we use a lot of Matrix analogies here, just Automate, give me the instructions. Congratulations.
John Furrier
>> Thank you.
John Furrier
>> Tell me about Neo. Talk about the focus, the origination story. Why Neo now?
Nick Warner
>> Sure. So Neo is focused on Agentic Software Control, and the genesis of that was in my 10 years in EDR and endpoint. A lot of threat detection was built on a foundational assumption, which was software could be predicted. And if you can predict good behavior, you can detect anomalous behavior against that. And with pretty high accuracy, you can determine that that's malicious. And what we started to see is with the introduction of agentic software and platforms, all of that goes out the window. And so we felt in forming Neo that the world really needed a new platform to better understand and control this new software world that we're living in in this AI era.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting, a lot of stuff in the news these days is You got the doom and gloomers and you got the optimists. I fall on the optimist side. I think AI is awesome. Just this week, the Anthropic employee wrote this scathing post, like 100 million views. Who knows if the numbers are real, but it got a lot of attention. You know, AI is going to kill us all. It's Terminator meets, but there's a lot of fear, but also there's so much opportunity. There's a lot changing from your perspective, seeing where you've come from and where we are now. What's the biggest change? Because there's certainly examples. We saw the Hugging Face example laid out at Black Hat with OpenAI. You see the agents kind of stituting their own economies.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> And armies, swarms of agents. What's the big difference right now for the security posture and for companies to deal with? Agentic?
Nick Warner
>> Well, I think it cuts both ways. One, the threat landscape has radically changed, but I think people forget that we ourselves on the practitioner side and the vendor side can use those AI tools. And so take, for example, the case of Neo. We do agentic software research that we could not have done 5 years ago. We would have to hire hundreds or thousands of threat researchers to do what thousands of research AI agents are doing for us now. So I think that balance of power will shake out. And what it really means is that Customers need to embrace AI, but they also need to take a fresh look at how to secure that because so much has changed in IT.
John Furrier
>> There's no doubt after Black Hat and before that RSA and every conference we go to, security has become almost an infrastructure pillar. Yeah, everything's in there. You get governance, huge factor, identity, machine and human tracking, observability, all that stuff that's been in there. What's your take on this? Because has the market shifted? You mentioned endpoints, kind of like been there, done that.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Now you have more threats, huge long tail we're seeing in models themselves. Is the approach that you're taking to build a model, use that model, build a product around it? What's that? What are you guys doing different? What's the main value proposition?
Nick Warner
>> Well, a couple of things there. I think Jensen's recent announcement around putting it out there with open weight models for folks, I think that's going to be revolutionary for those of us in cyber to use. I think so much has changed in terms of how software is built. So there was this really high barrier of entry. And so there was this idea of a software factory that would produce software, throw it over the wall, we would adopt and deploy. Everybody's a developer now, though. It's totally changed. So cyber itself needs to get very much in sort of the dev cycle because development's happening everywhere. It's happening on laptops, it's happening in servers, it's happening in the cloud.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting you mentioned Jensen Huang. I was talking with Arvind Krishna, CEO of IBM, recently this week. And we were talking about hybrid computing, hybrid cloud basically, which is basically what we live in. You get hyperscalers, you got NeoClouds, on-prem is booming. it's clear that you have distributed computing paradigm with hybrid cloud. Okay, good. We got Kubernetes and all that stuff going on. Great. Now you got the open weight models. What is the big value there? Because a lot of people are talking about open weights. Is it, The ability to tune data? Is it cost, size, clusters? Because open weights and hybrid cloud go really well together. What's your perspective on open weights? Because we're seeing a lot of people digging in hard on this.
Nick Warner
>> I think there's really 3 things that we think about. The first is obviously cost, because, in cybersecurity, we don't want to add, we don't want to drag down the bottom line. We want to be efficient and provide value. And that really helps us provide the best products. At a reasonable cost. I think the second is really this idea about ultimately we're going to see those things graduate into being more and more portable. And so this idea of having small local models that can run, that's super important with security because this idea that you can somehow ship or port all the data to some giant cloud brain to take a look at all of it. People want protection where the data lives and where it sits. And I think having a small model will help there.
Nick Warner
>> Cost and efficiency.
Nick Warner
>> Correct.
Nick Warner
>> And effectiveness.
Nick Warner
>> Yes. And I think the third thing is a lot of cyber detection is highly specialized. And so this idea that an open-weight model can be very much tuned to be fit for purpose, that's really important. Yeah.
John Furrier
>> You know, it's funny, we've had an expression we said on theCUBE going over 17 years now, and I think Andy Jassy probably used the quote the most. I think he might have originated it. He said there's no compression algorithm for experience. Yeah, that's kind of old. Yeah, you could actually compress learnings. You mentioned research.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Talk about this aspect. We're starting to see that trend happen in the power law of these models where I was just interviewing Cognichip out of Silicon Valley. They essentially have consolidated a model around semiconductor physics. Yeah. And they could design chips in hours and essentially have all that expertise, domain expertise compressed and available for practitioners.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Security makes total sense. What are your thoughts on that? Is that something that you guys are doing? Is that something you're thinking about?
Nick Warner
>> Well, one of our foundational technologies is something that we call the Neoverse, which is where we're mapping out the agentic software universe. That's a lot of work. There are tens of millions of pieces of software out there, both binary, non-binary. So even like Skills, tools, extensions, you think about this huge amount of data that we need to crawl through. We went from basically zero to having a hyperscaled agentic research workforce in something like 6 months.
John Furrier
>> Give an example of the application. Just give us a scope of like the order of magnitude of value that you—
Nick Warner
>> Well, I think in sort of a non-traditional software perspective, this notion of Skills— so Skills didn't exist until December. They were literally first introduced in December. And now, someone can download a skill inadvertently. They could think that it does something productive and benign. And it can be malicious. And so there's naturally no security controls in place for that. And so we literally had to be able to train a model to understand in plain English Skills, what they represent, what they do, are they malicious or not? And that's the type of thing that would have taken— you'd maybe have to hire a very specialized researcher to do that, train them up, train the team up. We were able to get 0 to 100 miles an hour on that in something 2 months.
John Furrier
>> And what would be the equivalent time to get that resource person trained, peaked, effective.
Nick Warner
>> Years, years, years. And so I think one other aspect of what you said really resonates, which is, you're— there are a lot of really good security tools out there, even traditional tools, but the mileage varies very much— really, the wide disparity is between sort of Type A forward-leaning cyber teams at big companies that can spend a lot and companies that have small, under-resourced, and, underfunded security teams. And I think that AI really helps level the playing field with that from a training assistance perspective. There's a lot of really interesting companies out there that are also doing agentic SOC, security Operation Centers. All of that stuff is really fascinating to see because before, it was really human power was the main holdback on this.
John Furrier
>> It's as if you go back 4 years from now and then say go back another 8 to 10 years, Almost every RSA or security conference had skilling and reskilling talks.
Nick Warner
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Okay. You mentioned skilling, but let's go into the operationalizing it because when you start saying, okay, we need training for people, staffing, and now agents as an extension of the workforce they essentially need to be trained. How does that skilling, reskilling change the operations? Because You have one, skilling of the machines, a.k.a. the agents.
John Furrier
>> Sure.
John Furrier
>> And the humans driving and turning on those agents.
Nick Warner
>> Well, I think a big part of it also is with AI-native security tools like Neo, we have a fully agentic platform ourselves. So we could drop in a rookie onto our platform and they can start to query it in plain English and it will do a lot of the heavy lifting. And that's true for a lot of new modern security solutions out there. And so I think that is a big difference versus I've been in cyber 25 years and generally it would take people years from the practitioner side to get up to speed. I think we're going to really be able to narrow that gap today.
John Furrier
>> All right. So we just nailed the what's happening. We know agents are everywhere. There's a lot of demand. Yeah, it's a good fit. What does it mean when we say, okay, stuff's off the rails. We hear stories about that. We saw the Hugging Face example. You said benign activity turns into malicious attacks. There's a lot of things going on operationally.
John Furrier
>> Sure.
John Furrier
>> Where does it go in your opinion? What's your vision? Because you have this layer of, I won't say reining in the chaos mode now.
John Furrier
>> Yep.
John Furrier
>> We're kind of cleaning up, getting it stable for ops. What's next?
Nick Warner
>> Well, I think we're going to get to a stage where we're going to much better understand and empower end users to define the capabilities of software before it runs. Because I think right now it's sort of spray and pray and I think increasingly, again, as I mentioned, the balance of power really works both ways. So there's amazing opportunity on the defender side. There's also going to be vastly increased threats. But I think what's very underplayed in the headlines is that security tools themselves are getting radically better by the month.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, with AI, with the humans tuning it, managing it, driving it.
Nick Warner
>> Yes. And we're in the early, early innings of it, but it is pretty amazing, like the journey even we've been on at Neo. And being fully AI native from day one, seeing how critical it is for us and how helpful it is for us to build and have a product that has a very low barrier of entry.
John Furrier
>> As an entrepreneur, share that AI native experience because I think this is a very unique time where you're in— you had an opportunity with a clean sheet of paper.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> To start Neo as an AI native security company. What does that mean? What's the velocity? What's it been like?
Nick Warner
>> Well, for us, it's really top to bottom. It's our HR and finance are fully agentic. Our CRM, we went with a modern, fully agentic platform. For us doing comp intel market research, we have agents that are trained and give us briefings every week. For our product in terms of doing security research, fully agentic and really helping us run lean and run fast.
John Furrier
>> How did you do it? What was the secret sauce? Was it just getting native with the tools.
Nick Warner
>> I think it takes discipline because all of us at Neo, many of us are very experienced in the industry. So we all come with our own biases of software that we prefer.
Nick Warner
>> Yeah.
Nick Warner
>> And it's saying no, no, let's do clean sheet and practice what we preach. But we also felt really strongly from day one that as a new company, you just can't keep up with your competitors unless you're embracing AI in all aspects.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
Nick Warner
>> And that's really not even mentioning sort of AI development, which really changes the game for us, at the speed that we can iterate and reiterate, and that's needed in this AI world.
John Furrier
>> It's interesting, language changes too with fashion and tech trends. You know, back in the old days, old days, recent days, the word stand up, stand up some infrastructure.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Build some software is turning into words like turn on.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> So in all the conversations, there are themes that arise the most, and I want to get your thoughts on this, how it applies to you guys, is whether it's graph databases or AI, the word context and intent come up a lot.
John Furrier
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> You're seeing user intent.
John Furrier
>> Yep.
John Furrier
>> In the security world for you guys, what is that intent that you're targeting the behavior you want to impact the most with?
Nick Warner
>> Yeah, for us, that was probably the most important influence on how we architected the product. So when we designed and built Neo, we wanted to get as close to the human-to-AI interaction as possible so we could understand intent. And for us, that meant building an endpoint sensor. So rather than having sort of a cloud platform, which is vastly easier to build, we thought it would be really important to get right next to that first activity of human to AI at the prompt, and that way you understand context and intent.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. And that's where the practitioners are right now.
Nick Warner
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> You're meeting them where they are. They want the headless system.
John Furrier
>> Correct.
John Furrier
>> I have a task, could be whatever it is.
John Furrier
>> Yep.
John Furrier
>> Now I have to go spin my chair around between 5 different tools.
John Furrier
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> All right, let's get into the opportunity you guys have because I appreciate the insights on the market and what's next. product market fit. What's your market? What's the product? Explain strategy and the plan.
Nick Warner
>> Yeah, so our market is vast. It's really any enterprise that's running software and that software is becoming agentic, which, you know, the stats are breathtaking. if you look at Gartner themselves says in 2025, 5% of enterprise apps were agentic. By the end of this year, it'll be 40%. By 2030, 100% of apps and software will be agentic. And so that paradigm shift really demands a new way of securing software. And so that's our market— small, large companies, government, every—
John Furrier
>> every—and that's a huge TAM because unlike other software paradigms, the users themselves will create the agents. That's right. You can't stop the AI demand. People love AI. It's not like a new tool like virtual desktop or some other IT-generated technology. Yeah, it's in high demand. Okay. What's the business model for you guys? Take us through some of the momentum you have and what should people know about Neo?
Nick Warner
>> Well, so our business model, we're channel first. I've been in cybersecurity 25 years and a critical go-to-market motion is our channel partners, both from a distribution marketplace and local VAR perspective. And, for us, it's getting people to understand that there's a problem brewing. And I think that, as you mentioned with the headlines, that's becoming pretty obvious to most folks. But there's a way to do it in a very elegant, easy to deploy manner. And so we're spending a lot of time with customers doing deployments, doing tests, and really helping them understand that there really needs to be a new control surface for software.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. Talk about the channel opportunity because the customers want services wrapped around security. It's not a one and done. How do you align with some of the channel needs and how are customers responding to channel partners?
Nick Warner
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> Is there a new playbook? Is there a new kind of value equation?
Nick Warner
>> Yeah. So we're seeing opportunities where we're getting deployed alongside an Agentic Software rollout. And so there's a, a new engineering tool that's highly agentic and they want to be able to understand, control, have context around that. And so as part of that IT project, Neo is getting deployed as well. So that's a services opportunity where what's really fascinating about this AI revolution that we're in is it's also changing the game. And, you know, you and I talked about this briefly before we started filming here is there are a lot of— it's like the intersection of IT and IT security now is almost fully complete where the two are interchangeable, both from an infrastructure development and security perspective. And so we're seeing a lot of conversations, much more than I've ever had in my career, with the CIO and the CTO rather than it just being a security challenge.
John Furrier
>> Agents are horizontal.
John Furrier
>> They're everywhere. Yes.
John Furrier
>> You have to have a full IT picture.
John Furrier
>> Yes.
John Furrier
>> And the data that they have access to is also challenging.
Nick Warner
>> Well, and one thing I would add, John, is that, you know, we spend a lot of time and the headlines are all around the frontier AI software products, but it's that HR software that you've known and trusted for 7, 8 years that becomes agentic. It's that accounting software that you used for 6 years that now is agentic next week. It's like, how do you understand and control that? How do you even know when it becomes agentic? That's sort of like what we're seeing right now is just the tip of the iceberg. It's going to be a fascinating—
John Furrier
>> and your promise to customers is, hey, we're going to make that secure.
Nick Warner
>> We are. Yeah. We're going to let you know what apps have become agentic, what are they capable of. And we can secure all of that for you.
John Furrier
>> It's Andy Grove's favorite expression we use a lot to let chaos reign and rein in the chaos. That's what you're doing. That's right. All right. Put a plug in for the company. Status of the firm. I know you got some financing, closed a Series A. You got— you're growing, you got needs, you're hiring. What's your focus? What are you optimizing for? Put a plug in.
Nick Warner
>> So, we're about a year and a half old. We raised $100 million from top-tier investors like a16z and Bessemer. We are in massive expansion mode now. So if there's folks out there who want to join an amazing AI-native security company with seasoned operators who have been there and done that, we're open for business and we're hiring and expanding like crazy.
Nick Warner
>> All departments, engineering, obviously, right?
>> engineering.And you got— your vision is to have the intelligence layer and control layer for
John Furrier
>> Agentic.Agentic
John Furrier
>> software.So specialized models are in your future. Open weights. I can probably feel that
John Furrier
>> coming.
John Furrier
>> Yes.It's
John Furrier
>> fast.
John Furrier
>> Yep.Thanks for coming on theCUBE, sharing what you guys are doing. Congratulations, by the
John Furrier
>> way.Thanks for having
John Furrier
>> me.All right. I'm John Furrier. This is our Cyber Security Leaders. Cybersecurity, big market opportunity category. But as it gets more infrastructure-oriented, you got to get down to the lowest levels to track all the agents, all the data, all the governance. All the identity so the agents know what they're doing. They're getting smarter, and if they don't go off the rails, that's a good thing. And of course, cybersecurity is going to protect that. Doing our part here on theCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier