Welcome to Season 2! In the return of the Innovator Series, host Eron Howard speaks with Ankita Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Akto, an emerging leader whose platform tackles one of the most persistent blind spots in modern cybersecurity: AI Agent security. Gupta is focused on solving AI Agent security at its core, building platform that allows organizations to continuously discover, risk asses, govern and guardrail AI Agents and MCPs.
Securing The New Age AI Agents, MCPs and Gen AI Apps
AI agents are no longer experimental.
They’re being deployed across enterprises to handle real tasks: querying databases, sending emails, executing code, managing workflows. As these agents gain access to sensitive systems and act autonomously, the attack surface explodes. Unlike traditional software, agents make decisions dynamically, often chaining tools and APIs together in ways developers never fully anticipated.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) amplifies this: it standardizes how agents connect to tools and data sources, which is powerful, but also means a single compromised or malicious MCP server can poison an agent’s context, redirect its actions, or exfiltrate data at scale. Prompt injection, tool abuse, shadow AI (employees spinning up unauthorized agents), and privilege escalation are no longer theoretical they’re live risks in production environments today. Security teams built their playbooks for APIs and applications; agents operate differently, reason differently, and fail differently. That gap between how agents actually behave and what security tools were designed to catch is exactly why AI agent and MCP security has become one of the most urgent and fastest-growing categories in enterprise security.
Gupta founded Akto to address this exact problem. The platform focuses on providing visibility into shadow AI and MCP usage across employee endpoints, and delivering red teaming and runtime guardrails for homegrown AI agents. Akto gives enterprise security teams the tools to govern, monitor, and protect their AI agent infrastructure before attackers find the gaps first.
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 Ankita Gupta and Akto in our 16 minute conversation on YouTube.