Egress founders return with $16m to police what AI agents do
Tony Pepper and Neil Larkins sold Egress to KnowBe4 in 2024. Their new London and New York startup, backed by AlbionVC, Evolution Equity and Crane, checks every tool call an agent makes before it runs
- Outerlimit announced its $16m (£12m) pre-seed round on 22 September, with money from AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners and Crane Venture Partners.
- Egress Software Technologies was incorporated on 9 October 2007 with Pepper and Larkins as its first directors, according to Companies House.
- KnowBe4 agreed to buy Egress on 24 April 2024 and closed the deal on 9 July 2024, without disclosing the price.
- AlbionVC and FTV Capital were Egress investors before the sale, and AlbionVC is now backing the founders again.
- Outerlimit has offices in London and New York.
Agentic-AI security has no incumbent yet, so the vendor that gets into MSSP and reseller portfolios first will set the terms. Outerlimit is not waiting for the FTSE 100 design work to finish: its website already offers a partner program for resellers, systems integrators and technology vendors, with deal registration and a partner portal, as Egress did for MSPs and resellers. The near-term margin is in discovery, not enforcement: finding and watching agents is a service partners can sell now, before any customer lets a startup police production systems. The loser is the reseller that treats this as another point product rather than a reason to reopen the identity and access conversation.
“The demand to deploy agentic AI is unparalleled, but security teams are being asked to sign off on risks they cannot adequately control.”Tony Pepper, chief executive, Outerlimit
Outerlimit, a security startup co-founded by the two men who built Egress, came out of stealth on 22 September with a $16m (£12m) pre-seed round from AlbionVC, Evolution Equity Partners and Crane Venture Partners. The company says it is one of the largest pre-seed rounds in cybersecurity.
The product is an authorization layer for AI agents. Rather than trusting an agent once it has logged in, Outerlimit checks identity, policy and context at the moment the agent calls a tool. Credentials are split into fragments and reassembled only when all three line up. The company calls this extending zero trust to the ‘agent action layer’ and sets out three stages for customers: discover the agents and shadow AI already running, observe what they do, then enforce deterministic controls.
Who is behind it
Tony Pepper, chief executive, and Neil Larkins co-founded Egress in London in 2007 and sold the email-security business to KnowBe4, a Vista Equity Partners company, in 2024. The third co-founder, Dr Peter Vincent, chief technology officer, is a theoretical neuroscientist from University College London’s Sainsbury Wellcome Centre. Angels in the round include Brian Murphy, founder of ReliaQuest, Charles Gorintin, co-founder of Alan, and David Garfield, founder of Garrison.
Fintech Global reported the round on 24 September. Outerlimit says it is working with Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 brands but names none, gives no general availability date and does not say how the money will be spent.
