{"id":63351,"date":"2026-06-05T10:57:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T10:57:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/63351\/"},"modified":"2026-06-05T10:57:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T10:57:11","slug":"hetz-ventures-backs-willows-7m-ai-agent-security-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/63351\/","title":{"rendered":"Hetz Ventures backs Willow’s $7m AI agent security play"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Willow\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Willow<\/a>, an Israeli agentic access platform that enables enterprises to safely govern and control AI agents, has emerged from stealth with $7m in seed funding to accelerate product development and its go-to-market strategy.<\/p>\n

The round was led by Hetz Ventures, with early angel backing from Wix co-founder and CEO Avishai Abrahami and Wix president Nir Zohar, both of whom invested at the company\u2019s earliest stage. Proceeds will be directed towards expanding Willow\u2019s commercial operations and advancing its product roadmap.<\/p>\n

The funding arrives at a moment of significant tension between rapid AI agent adoption and insufficient governance infrastructure. With 79% of companies now deploying AI agents internally and 73% operating multi-agent systems, these tools have quickly become embedded in enterprise operations. Yet a 2026 survey found that 65% of companies have experienced agent-related security incidents in the past year, underscoring how little oversight has accompanied the rollout.<\/p>\n

Willow\u2019s platform addresses this gap by providing organisations with a governance and access layer that determines how AI agents connect to internal systems, which actions they are permitted to carry out, and which agents employees are already using without authorisation. The platform detects shadow AI, applies granular access controls, and maintains audit trails across all agent interactions. It supports connections to agents including Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini, n8n and custom-built tools, and offers a marketplace with over 1,000 ready-to-use connectors, more than 100 skills and more than 100 plugins. Willow can be deployed as SaaS, as a dedicated cloud environment, or as a self-hosted solution, including in air-gapped settings.<\/p>\n

Willow was founded by former Wix engineers Eyal Ben Ezra as CEO, Shalev Shalit as CTO and Idan Chetrit as VP platform. Over the past year the company has worked closely with enterprise design partners, most notably Wix itself, where the platform has been deployed across more than 5,000 employees. The company said it is already expanding into customers across sectors including cybersecurity, real estate and FinTech.<\/p>\n

Willow CEO and co-founder Eyal Ben Ezra said, \u201cCurrently businesses find themselves in an impossible trade-off: either lock AI down because it can\u2019t be trusted or allow AI agents to operate with unrestrained access to systems and data and hope nothing goes wrong. Willow offers another option. Willow gives enterprises the control needed to adopt AI earnestly without letting it run unchecked. With complete oversight into how any AI agent is deployed, we ensure enterprises control every move an agent makes, narrowing the attack surface exponentially and providing companies with the assurance they need to roll out their AI agents.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The following investor(s) were tagged in this article.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Willow, an Israeli agentic access platform that enables enterprises to safely govern and control AI agents, has emerged…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,7537,11469,8915,3687,36086,3812,35796,17529],"class_list":["post-63351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-cybertech","tag-enterprise-security","tag-fintech","tag-hetz-ventures","tag-regtech","tag-willow","tag-wix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}