Zenity Named a Market Shaper in Gartner AI Application Security Quadrant

[John Brown]

Zenity has been named a Market Shaper in Gartner’s inaugural Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security, Startup Vendors. The recognition highlights the company’s approach to securing autonomous AI systems and strengthening AI application security across enterprise environments. Zenity is one of only two vendors placed in the Market Shapers quadrant among nearly 20 startup vendors assessed by Gartner.

The recognition comes as organizations increasingly deploy AI agents that can access data, use business applications, invoke tools, and take actions with limited human intervention. These capabilities introduce security challenges that traditional application and identity controls may not fully address.

Gartner Highlights Emerging AI Security Requirements​

Gartner’s Emerging Market Quadrant focuses on startups developing technologies for the evolving AI application security market. According to Zenity’s announcement, Gartner’s Market Shapers category recognizes vendors that move beyond baseline AI application security features to analyze the broader behavior of AI agents.

This includes examining factors such as agent intent, memory, skills, tool usage, data access, and system modifications.

The approach also considers whether an agent’s actual behavior matches its intended instructions and permissions. This distinction becomes important when autonomous systems operate dynamically and interact with multiple applications and data sources.

Gartner also highlights continuous and event-driven security posture management, adaptive testing, and runtime enforcement as important capabilities for securing AI agents.

Zenity Focuses on Runtime AI Security​

Zenity has built its security platform around monitoring and controlling AI agents throughout their lifecycle. Its capabilities include AI discovery and exposure management, runtime security, agent governance, incident response, and controls designed to manage agent actions.

The company’s platform is designed to provide visibility across AI systems operating in SaaS applications, cloud environments, and endpoint devices.

Zenity also uses intent-aware security controls to assess what AI agents are doing during execution. This allows security teams to identify behavior that may deviate from an agent’s intended purpose or established security boundaries.

The company also offers Runtime Boundaries and Guardian Agents to help organizations enforce controls and respond to security risks involving autonomous AI.

Addressing AI Agent Behavior​

Traditional security approaches often focus on permissions, configurations, and known vulnerabilities. However, autonomous AI agents can make decisions dynamically and interact with different systems based on changing instructions and contextual information.

Zenity’s approach focuses on monitoring agent behavior in real time alongside the permissions and access available to the agent.

The company says its platform can help security teams understand which AI agents exist within an organization, what resources they can access, what tools they use, and how they behave during execution.

This visibility is intended to help organizations identify potential security exposure before or during an AI agent's operation.

Connecting AI Security Across the Enterprise​

Zenity provides security coverage across SaaS-managed agents, custom-built cloud applications, and endpoint environments. The company also highlights support for emerging agent-to-agent and Model Context Protocol (MCP) interactions.

Its platform provides AI observability and security posture management before deployment, followed by detection and response capabilities during runtime.

This full-lifecycle approach is designed to help security teams manage AI systems from discovery and configuration through active operation and incident response.

Gartner Recognition Follows Earlier AI Governance Mention​

The latest recognition follows Gartner's earlier 2026 recognition of Zenity in AI agent governance.

Earlier this year, Gartner named Zenity the “Company to Beat” in AI Agent Governance. Zenity said the earlier research highlighted its intent-aware runtime defense, full-lifecycle observability across SaaS, cloud, and endpoint environments, as well as shadow AI discovery and posture management.

Together, the two Gartner recognitions cover AI application security and AI agent governance, two areas that are becoming increasingly important as enterprises expand their use of autonomous AI.

Zenity said it is the only company it believes has received both recognitions in Gartner's 2026 research. This statement represents Zenity's own characterization of the Gartner research.

Zenity Expands Its Enterprise AI Security Platform​

The Gartner recognition comes after Zenity raised $125 million in Series C funding. The company said the funding will support its efforts to secure autonomous AI deployments.

Zenity works with Fortune 2000 organizations deploying AI across enterprise environments, according to the company.

Its platform focuses on helping security teams discover AI agents, understand their exposure, establish security controls, monitor behavior, and respond to incidents.

As introduce enterprises more autonomous systems, these capabilities can help organizations address security risks that arise when AI agents receive access to sensitive information and business-critical tools.

Building Security Controls for Autonomous AI​

AI agents are moving beyond simple conversational interactions and increasingly performing tasks across enterprise systems. They can retrieve information, interact with applications, make decisions, and execute actions based on their assigned objectives.

This shift creates a need for security controls that can evaluate not only what an AI agent is authorized to access but also how it behaves during an active session.

Zenity's platform is designed around this model by combining discovery, posture management, runtime detection, enforcement, and response.

The company's latest Gartner recognition reflects the growing focus on specialized security technologies for autonomous AI applications. As organizations continue expanding agentic AI deployments, security teams will need greater visibility into agent identities, permissions, actions, tool usage, and interactions across enterprise environments.

SOC News provides the latest updates, insights, and trends in cybersecurity and security operations.

Read related news - https://soc-news.com/knowbe4-shuts-down-shadow-ai-with-browser-security-tool/