Echo raises $35M to secure container images with AI agents

2 hours ago7 min read

The announcement that Israeli startup Echo has secured $35 million in Series A funding, led by N47 with participation from Notable Capital, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne, is more than just another venture capital headline. It signals a critical, and arguably overdue, infrastructural pivot for the AI era.As enterprises rush to deploy large language models and autonomous agentic workflows, they are confronting a foundational flaw in their development stack: the inherently insecure container base images that serve as the operating system for virtually all modern cloud applications. Echo’s thesis is both radical and historically resonant—it aims to replace the chaotic, volunteer-maintained open-source supply chain with a managed, secure-by-design platform, effectively positioning itself as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the age of AI.This isn't merely a scanning or patching solution; it's a fundamental re-engineering of how software artifacts are built. The company operates what its CTO, Eylam Milner, describes as a 'software compilation factory,' which compiles binaries and libraries directly from source code on an empty canvas, rather than attempting to sanitize the bloated, vulnerability-riddled images that are the current industry standard.This process, coupled with hardening and adherence to SLSA Level 3 provenance standards, produces a 'drop-in replacement' that is mathematically cleaner, offering a zero-vulnerability-by-default foundation. The urgency for such a solution is being exponentially accelerated by the very technology it aims to support.We are entering a phase of an AI-versus-AI security arms race, where malicious actors leverage AI to shrink exploit windows from weeks to days, while AI coding agents statistically select outdated and vulnerable libraries from open-source repositories at an unprecedented scale. In a fascinating recursive loop, Echo employs its own proprietary AI agents to autonomously manage vulnerability research, continuously monitoring the National Vulnerability Database and unstructured sources like GitHub, and even initiating self-healing patch processes.For Chief Information Security Officers, the value proposition shifts the paradigm from reactive mean-time-to-remediation to proactive prevention, a shift that Dan Garcia, CISO of customer EDB, quantifies as saving 'at least 235 developer hours per release. ' The broader context here is the maturation of AI from a model-centric to an infrastructure-centric discipline.Just as the reliability of the Linux kernel was non-negotiable for the internet boom, the integrity of the container base image is becoming the non-negotiable substrate for autonomous AI workflows. If Echo and similar ventures succeed, they won't just be selling security; they will be defining the trusted, managed substrate upon which the next generation of mission-critical, agent-driven applications will be built, fundamentally altering the DevSecOps landscape by making infrastructure debt a relic of a less rigorous past.

#Echo

#container security

#AI agents

#secure base images

#Series A funding

#DevSecOps

#featured