In Episode 7, we chat with Shahar Bahat, CEO and co-founder of Pluto Security. Pluto won the inaugural Best Emerging Technology Award at our 2026 Innovate Cybersecurity Spring Summit on Marco Island, in a vote of 160 CISOs and security executives. The company is tackling one of the fastest-growing blind spots in the enterprise: what happens on the endpoint when every employee becomes an AI builder.
Workspace Security for the AI Era
Bahat’s last role before Pluto Security was at Microsoft on the Defender product team. There she watched employees, pressed to be productive with AI, quietly turn to unapproved tools, with company IP ending up in free versions of those tools along the way. Her co-founder Tal Ofer Regev, then a VP at Palo Alto Networks, saw the same thing happening there. When they took the pattern to 60 or 70 other security leaders, the response was unanimous: organizations were losing control of how AI was being used, and they saw no end in sight.
That led to Pluto’s core premise: the way employees use their endpoints has fundamentally changed, so the way we protect them has to change too. Today’s endpoint holds AI coding assistants, app builders, and agents. It also carries an AI supply chain of MCP servers, skills, plugins, and extensions, which Bahat says malicious actors now target in live attacks every week. And employees are no longer just users. They’re creators, generating apps and agent workflows that take on lives of their own while the company remains accountable for them.
Pluto connects agentlessly to existing security and infrastructure systems to give security teams visibility, risk assessment, and automated enforcement across all of those layers, with value delivered on day one. Industry analysts have taken notice: Latio named Pluto the AI Security Endpoint Leader in its 2026 AI Security Market Report, and Gartner cited it as a sample vendor for AI usage control. Pluto’s goal is to let security teams say yes to AI innovation without giving up control.
The Innovator Series is meant to get inside the mind of the founder, and learn what inspired and motivated them to find success in the cybersecurity industry. Learn more about Shahar Bahat and Pluto Security in our 12-minute conversation on YouTube.
