Staff Technical Writer

The AlleyWatch startup daily funding report: 10/20/2026. The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 10/20/2026 featuring funding details for Daytona, Prism Data, and much more. This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings. Daytona - $60M. Daytona, a cloud infrastructure platform that provides secure sandboxes for running AI agents and AI-generated code, has raised $60M in Series B funding led by FirstMark Capital with participation from Patrick Collison, Adam D'Angelo, Brendan Foody, Tobi Lutke, Olivier Pomel, Aravind Srinivas, Eric Yuan, Alumni Ventures, Evergreen Fund, Okta Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next, Torch Capital, Pace Capital, Upfront Ventures, and E2VC. Founded by Ivan Burazin, Goran Draganic, and Vedran Jukic in 2023, Daytona has now raised a total of $91M in reported equity funding. Prism Data - $20M. Prism Data, a cash flow analytics platform that provides automated credit risk underwriting for lenders using consumer bank transaction data, has raised $20M in Series A funding led by Story Ventures with participation from FINTOP Capital, Core Innovation Capital, Obvious Ventures, 1st & Main Growth Partners, and Mana Ventures. Founded by Jason Rosen in 2016, Prism Data has now raised a total of $25M in reported equity funding. Mural - $15M. Mural, a financial infrastructure platform that lets fintechs and businesses move, store, and manage money across stablecoins and fiat currencies, has raised $15M in Series A funding led by Tether with participation from North Island Ventures. Founded by Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes in 2022, Mural has now raised a total of $28M in reported equity funding. CONNECT WITH NYC'S TECH COMMUNITY AlleyWatch is read daily by the founders, VCs, and executives shaping NYC's startup scene. Advertise today Pennant AI - $5M. Pennant AI, an AI platform that automates corporate governance research and proxy voting for institutional investors, has raised $5M in Seed funding led by Urban Innovation Fund with participation from Y Combinator. Pennant AI was founded by Ryan Nowicki Stewart and Tomas Taylor in 2026. Juice Reel - $2.5M. SportsTech Juice Reel, a sports betting tracking app and marketplace that verifies and ranks bettors' picks, has raised $2.5M in funding according to a recent SEC filing. The filing indicates that there were seventeen investors in this round. Juice Reel was founded by Ricky Gold in 2019.

AI-powered hacking attacks jumped 89% last year, according to CrowdStrike's own threat report. The finding is pushing buyers to choose between one connected security platform and a pile of separate tools. CrowdStrike's Falcon Flex bundling programme has grown its contracted value past $2 billion, more than doubling in a year. Palo Alto Networks added about 220 "platformization" deals in a recent quarter, more than twice the pace of two years earlier. Fortinet is using its lead in network firewalls to cross-sell. SentinelOne, Cloudflare, and Zscaler make thinner platform cases. Okta remains a point solution focused on verifying logins. CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks are both down more than 13% from their October 6 record highs, amid reports that OpenAI may buy a cybersecurity startup.

Employees built the agents. Enterprises just bought the supervisors. The biggest AI risks inside companies are coming not from developers but from finance, marketing, and legal teams building their own tools. Now a new security layer is being built to watch what those agents do. Dana Ellison Forkast mind | 2026-10-14 10:10 AM PDT The enterprise is splitting into two lanes for AI agents, and the divide is creating a new reality for how work gets monitored. On one side: company-deployed agents - the official, IT-sanctioned tools managed through identity governance platforms like Okta, which is developing "Agent SSO" to treat agents as first-class identity citizens, and SailPoint, which is building the compliance and access-review layer for these digital workers. On the other side: what Pluto Security CEO Shahar Bahat calls "vibe-coded" agents - tools built by employees in finance, marketing, legal, and other departments using AI coding tools, often operating entirely outside IT's view. Pluto Security, which monitors the AI tools employees bring into the workplace, reports that 60% of the risks it detects come from these worker-built tools. Finance departments are the primary source, followed by marketing and legal. Developers rank fourth. That ranking matters because it tells you who is actually building the agents that security teams are now scrambling to govern: not the engineers, but the business units trying to automate their own workflows. Bahat describes the company's positioning as a shift from monitoring user behavior to monitoring agent behavior. But that framing obscures a more uncomfortable truth. When a security layer flags an agent built by a finance employee to automate a spreadsheet reconciliation, the intervention is directed at the employee's workflow. The agent is the proxy. The human who built it is the one being watched. During proof-of-concept deployments, Pluto found active live attacks in every single engagement - compromised extension packages and malicious skills already operating inside client environments. These are not abstract risks. They are direct consequences of employees solving their own problems with tools nobody in IT approved. The security industry is responding with two layers. The identity layer - Okta, SailPoint - decides which agents get access to corporate resources in the first place. The runtime enforcement layer, where companies like Pluto and Classie (with its Supervise platform) operate, watches what those agents do once they are inside. Both layers are trying to solve the same problem: how to maintain control when the speed of agent deployment outpaces the speed of governance.