Straiker wins five Top InfoSec Innovator Awards for 2026

Cyber Defense Magazine named Straiker a winner in five categories of its annual Top InfoSec Innovator Awards for 2026, announced during CyberDefenseCon 2026. In their 14th year, the Top InfoSec Innovator Awards celebrate the most innovative cybersecurity companies shaping the future of the industry. The judging panel is made up of infosec veterans and investors. Straiker won for the following five categories:

• Market Leader, Agentic AI Platform
• Next Gen AI Discovery and Assessment
• Market Disruptor, AI Exposure Management (AIEM)
• Visionary Cybersecurity Startup
• Market Innovator, GenAI Agentic Application Security

A year ago, many of these categories did not exist. Each category answers a question security teams started asking once agents moved from demos into production. Here is why each award matters today:

Market Leader, Agentic AI Platform

Who does a security team call when the thing they need to protect is an agent? Until recently the answer was a patchwork of prompt filters, DLP rules, and (human) consultants, none of which understood that an AI agent plans, calls tools, holds memory, and acts on its own.

A platform category exists when buyers want one place to find, test, and protect the whole system. As enterprises scale their use of AI agents, security teams need an integrated approach rather than more disconnected tools to manage. This award recognizes Straiker’s Discover AI, Ascend AI, and Defend AI working as one integrated agentic AI security platform.

Next Gen, AI Discovery and Assessment

You cannot protect what you don’t know. Agents are the newest version of that same old problem, and they are easier to create than any asset before them. An engineer can build an agent up in an afternoon, a business team can connect a copilot to a shared drive without a ticket, and most never show up in a Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

Discovery is counting which models, agents, MCP servers, and tool connections exist, and who owns each. Assessment is the harder half: what each agent can reach, what it is allowed to do, and whether its configuration is safe, rechecked with every deployment. This award maps to Straiker’s Discover AI, which customers have used to find and assess agents they did not know were running.

Market Disruptor, AI Exposure Management (AIEM)

Exposure management is a mature practice, so why does AI need its own version? Because an agent can run fully patched software and still be wide open. Its weaknesses live in behavior: a system prompt overridden by a cleverly worded document, a tool call that trusts whatever the model hands it, a memory poisoned by one bad web page. 

Reachability changes too. An agent with read access to email and write access to a CRM turns one prompt injection into a data exfiltration path. CISOs do not need a new program, just an AI lens on the one they run. For Straiker, this is where Discover AI and Ascend AI meet: inventory gives the reachability, adversarial testing gives the proof.

Visionary, Cybersecurity Startup

Cyber Defense Magazine gives the Visionary award to companies building for a problem ahead of the market, and before many realize it exists. In 2026, that continues to describe AI agent security. Many enterprises are piloting agents, but budgets for AI security are new. Some CISOs still reasonably hope existing controls will hold.

Straiker was founded on the view that agents would become the dominant way technology is headed, and that securing them would need tools built for how agents behave: prompt injection, tool abuse, memory poisoning, agent-to-agent attacks. The credit also belongs to the practitioners who took the bet with us, usually because they had already seen an agent do something it should not have (or at least feared what could be to come).

Market Innovator, GenAI Agentic Application Security

Web apps brought the OWASP Top 10. APIs brought their own list. Agents are the newest shift, and it is bigger, because the agentic application now makes decisions at runtime that no developer wrote down. The code can be clean while the behavior is exploitable, so static analysis and a pre-release pen test cover only part of the surface.

Securing an agentic application means attacking it the way an adversary would, through conversation, the content it reads, the tools it calls, and the agents it talks to, and then watching it in production. This award recognizes Ascend AI for its agentic red-teaming capabilities and Defend AI for runtime security, built so a failed test becomes an instant defense capability. 

What the five add up to

Together the categories describe a lifecycle: find the agents, measure their exposure, attack them first, protect them at runtime, all from one place. A year ago that was a slide. Now it has award categories, which means buyers, budgets, and competitors are catching up.

Thank you to Cyber Defense Magazine and the judges. The full list of Top InfoSec Innovators for 2026 is at https://cyberdefenseawards.com/top-infosec-innovators-for-2026/.

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