Gartner Names Zenity a Market Shaper for AI Application Security

Zenity has been named a Market Shaper in Gartner's inaugural Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security — Startup Vendors, a new report evaluating vendors on their ability to secure AI agents across the full agent lifecycle.

This is another top recognition from Gartner in 2026, following Zenity being named as the Company to Beat in AI Agent Governance. These two categories cover the most critical dimensions of the emerging AI security market.

This recognition centers on a distinction Gartner draws throughout the report: the difference between meeting the mandatory features of AI application security and analyzing how an agent actually behaves once it's live.

Most AI application security tools were built to check a box: scan the code, flag the obvious misconfiguration, confirm a baseline set of controls is in place. That approach misses what actually happens once an agent is running. An agent's permissions can look fine on paper while its real-time behavior, its intent, its tool use, and the data it touches quietly drift from what anyone approved.

We believe that’s what sets Zenity apart from the other players in the market.

“Autonomous agents are already reasoning, remembering, and acting inside the enterprise, and already exposing organizations to incidents the old security playbook can't catch. We saw this coming before the market had a name for it, and we've been shaping it ever since: securing AI means understanding what agents intend to do, not just what they're permitted to do. We are proud about Gartner's recognition, but the real proof is the many Fortune 500 organizations trusting Zenity to secure the AI they're running their businesses on. The autonomous AI era is here, and Zenity exists to enable it responsibly and securely,” said Ben Kliger, Co-Founder and CEO of Zenity.

Two Recognitions, One Security Architecture

This Market Shaper placement follows Gartner naming Zenity the Company to Beat in AI Agent Governance earlier this year. In that research, Gartner pointed to Zenity's intent-aware runtime defense, its full-lifecycle observability across SaaS, cloud, and endpoint environments, and its shadow AI discovery and posture management as reasons it led the pack.

Together, the two recognitions span two of the most critical dimensions of the emerging AI security market: AI application security and AI agent governance. Zenity believes it is the only company recognized both as a Market Shaper in Gartner's 2026 Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security and as the Company to Beat in AI Agent Governance.

What Sets Market Shapers Apart

According to the report, vendors in the Market Shapers quadrant move beyond baseline controls to examine the full spectrum of AI agent behavior: user request, user intent, agent instructions, agent intent, memory, skills, tool use, data access, and system modification actions. They compare an agent's intended instructions and permissions against its actual behavior to surface deviations or misuse, and they run comprehensive scans of code repositories and deployment pipelines to map connections and risk across the environment.

Gartner also highlights adaptive, context-aware testing that detects issues like privilege escalation and data exfiltration, paired with session-level analysis that monitors an agent's behavior holistically rather than as a series of disconnected events.

This is the gap between snapshot-based security and continuous, contextual security. A permissions review at deployment time tells a security team what an agent was authorized to do. It doesn't tell them what the agent is doing three hundred tool calls into a live session, or whether a chain of ordinary-looking actions adds up to something it shouldn't.

From Passive Observation to Guardian Agents

The report draws a second distinction that matters just as much: Market Shapers use continuous, event-driven agent security posture management to identify risk and enforce security boundaries at runtime, and they pair deterministic controls with agent-powered security controls, what Gartner refers to as “guardian agents,” rather than relying primarily on passive observation.

Gartner's case example in the report describes exactly the scenario this is built for: autonomous agents operating over extended sessions, exposed to prompt injection or tainted training data that gradually shifts their behavior beyond intended policy boundaries. Without continuous session monitoring and adaptive controls, that drift goes undetected until it's already caused harm.

Built Around the Same Requirements Gartner Is Describing

Zenity has built its platform around many of the same enterprise security requirements Gartner outlines for Market Shapers. The platform provides continuous discovery and exposure management across an organization's AI estate, intent-aware security at runtime, Runtime Boundaries to govern agent actions, incident response capabilities, and Guardian Agents designed to help security teams secure AI agents at scale.

A Signal of Execution, Not Just Vision

Gartner's analysis of potential to execute weighs more than product capability. The report notes that Market Shapers have secured significant capital, operate under multiyear enterprise license agreements across the Fortune 500 and Global 2000, and are frequently shortlisted by buyers for proof-of-concept testing.

That growth trajectory shows up in Zenity's own trajectory, too. The company recently closed a $125 million Series C to accelerate its mission to secure the era of autonomous AI, and it works with Fortune 2000 organizations deploying AI across the enterprise.

“Gartner has now recognized Zenity from two distinct perspectives, as a Market Shaper in AI Application Security and as the Company to Beat in AI Agent Governance,” said Ben Kliger, Co-Founder and CEO of Zenity. “For us, the significance is the combination. Enterprises need to know where AI is operating, understand what agents intend to do, govern what they are permitted to do, and intervene when their actions create risk. That is the security architecture Zenity has built for autonomous AI.”

Read the Full Report

The full Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Application Security — Startup Vendors report includes Gartner's complete analysis of the Market Shapers quadrant, recommended actions for evaluating startup vendors against established alternatives, and the criteria Gartner used to assess disruptive potential and potential to execute across the market.

Download the Gartner report to see the full evaluation and decide whether a Market Shaper fits the AI agents you're running in production today.