Ex-founders of Sygnia and Ermetic raise $17 million in Seed round to build the WhatsApp of AI agents
Communication between AI agents inside companies has become a mess. And anyone working with automation and intelligent systems in a corporate environment knows exactly what we are talking about: each agent does its own thing, but when they need to coordinate, the whole process turns into a tangled knot. There is no clear protocol, no standardized communication layer, and the result is that companies burn time and money trying to get these systems to talk to each other in a functional way, when they should be focused on scaling results.
This is exactly the problem that Band, a new Israeli startup, wants to solve. And they came in swinging, raising $17 million right out of the gate in a seed round that caught the market’s attention. 💰
Behind the project are founders with an impressive track record, coming from two of the most respected companies in digital security: Sygnia and Ermetic. People who have already built critical infrastructure, who understand what it means to operate in complex corporate environments, and who now want to create something like a WhatsApp for AI agents. The idea is to build a platform where these agents can communicate, share context, and work together in real time without relying on hacky integration workarounds.
The news was published on April 23, 2025 by Ctech, and since then the topic has been a constant buzz across the sector. 🚀 If you follow the progress of agentic AI, you know this is one of the biggest bottlenecks right now. And for the first time, there is a serious team with capital and technical credibility tackling this challenge head-on.
The real problem behind the investment
To understand why this seed round of $17 million makes so much sense, you need to look at what is happening with agentic AI in companies today. AI agents have evolved a lot over the past two years. They can execute complex tasks, make autonomous decisions, and operate within sophisticated workflows. The problem is that when you put several of these agents to work together inside an organization, things start falling apart.
Each agent was built with its own logic, its own context, and often its own way of communicating. The result is a fragmented environment where coordination between them requires constant human intervention or band-aid solutions that simply do not scale. It is like assembling a team of brilliant professionals who all speak completely different languages and have zero tools to understand each other.
This bottleneck is not small. Companies that have already adopted multi-agent architectures report that a huge chunk of their engineering effort goes toward solving this communication layer rather than developing the actual capabilities of the agents themselves. It is as if you had a talented team but no reliable messaging system for them to exchange information. The talent is there, the competence is there, but coordinated execution stalls because the communication infrastructure was never designed for this scenario.
Receive the best innovation content in your email.
All the news, tips, trends, and resources you're looking for, delivered to your inbox.
By subscribing to the newsletter, you agree to receive communications from Método Viral. We are committed to always protecting and respecting your privacy.
And this is where Band‘s proposal comes in as a direct answer to a pain point the market already recognizes as real and urgent. The startup positions itself to solve the growing challenge of coordination and communication between AI agents inside enterprises, offering an infrastructure layer that until now simply did not exist as a dedicated product.
The rapid growth of the agentic AI market
What makes this moment even more relevant is that the agentic AI market is growing at breakneck speed. More and more companies are betting on multi-agent architectures to automate business processes. From financial operations to customer service, logistics, and supply chain management, AI agents are being deployed across virtually every sector of the economy.
The lack of a robust communication protocol between these agents is becoming a global-scale problem. It is no exaggeration to say that solving this issue could be as important for the future of corporate automation as the creation of the first internet protocols was for digital connectivity. And the founders coming from Sygnia and Ermetic seem to have a clear understanding of the scale of this challenge.
Think about the current scenario: a large company might have one agent specialized in data analysis, another focused on customer service, a third handling compliance, and yet a fourth managing internal approval workflows. When these agents need to work together to resolve a request that crosses different departments, chaos ensues. Without a standardized communication layer, each integration has to be built manually, case by case, generating operational costs that grow exponentially as the number of agents increases.
Who the founders are and why it matters
Sygnia is one of the most recognized incident response and cybersecurity firms in the world, known for handling some of the most critical and complex cases in the industry. Founded by veterans of Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Forces, the company built a solid reputation helping global organizations deal with advanced threats and large-scale cyberattacks.
Ermetic, on the other hand, was a cloud security startup that built a solid platform for identity and permissions management in cloud environments. The company was acquired by Tenable in 2023 for a significant sum, cementing the team’s success in building security infrastructure technology aimed at the enterprise market.
Having founders with experience at these two organizations is no small detail. It means these people have already operated in environments where failure is not an option, where infrastructure needs to be robust, auditable, and secure from day one. That kind of experience shapes a very specific mindset about how to build technology products for the corporate world.
The security DNA as a competitive advantage
This background in digital security is especially relevant when we are talking about a communication platform for AI agents. Because if there is one thing the enterprise market will demand from this communication layer, it is reliability and security. It is not enough for agents to just exchange messages. They need to share sensitive information, business data, and decision context, all within an environment where any leak or coordination failure can have serious consequences.
A team with cybersecurity DNA approaching this problem brings a perspective that few product teams would naturally have. While most AI startups worry about functionality first and security later, these founders think about security as a fundamental part of the architecture from day zero. That is a massive differentiator when the target audience is large corporations dealing with sensitive data and strict regulations.
On top of that, the fact that they come from Ermetic means these founders have already navigated the full lifecycle of an infrastructure startup: they built a complex technical product, found traction in the enterprise market, scaled it, and reached a successful exit. That kind of experience is hard to replace. They know how to sell to large companies, they know how to build trust with security and IT teams, and they know how to turn advanced technology into a product that actually goes into production.
The seed round of $17 million likely reflects exactly that accumulated credibility. Investors do not put that kind of capital into a seed round because of a pretty idea on a slide. They invest because they trust the team and its ability to execute. 🎯
The idea of a WhatsApp for AI agents
The analogy of a WhatsApp for AI agents might sound simple, but it captures something important about Band‘s value proposition. WhatsApp solved a communication problem that people had: the fragmentation between different messaging systems, the lack of a reliable, accessible, and standardized channel for exchanging information in real time.
Band wants to do the same thing, but for AI agents. The idea is to create a communication layer where different agents, regardless of who built them or what platform they run on, can share context, coordinate tasks, and operate collaboratively without needing an engineer stuck in the middle mediating every interaction.
This involves some very specific technical challenges worth breaking down:
- The context problem: AI agents need to do more than just exchange messages. They need to share the state of a task, the history of decisions, and the objective in progress. Unlike a text message between humans, communication between agents needs to be structured in a way that the receiver can act on it immediately, without ambiguity.
- The latency problem: in automated workflows, response time matters a lot. A communication platform for agents needs to operate with low latency, especially when those agents are executing chained tasks where the output of one is the input of the next.
- The scale problem: in large corporate environments, there can be dozens or hundreds of agents operating at the same time, and the communication infrastructure needs to handle that without performance degradation.
- The interoperability problem: agents built on different frameworks, using different language models, and running in different cloud environments need to be able to communicate through a common protocol. Without that, the promise of a multi-agent ecosystem stays trapped in technology silos.
Why the timing is strategic
If Band can deliver a solution that addresses these points with the robustness that the enterprise environment demands, the potential market size is enormous. Every company building multi-agent architectures is going to need something like this. And since this wave of corporate AI agent adoption is just getting started, entering now with an infrastructure solution is a pretty smart timing play.
Whoever defines the communication protocol in this ecosystem holds a very relevant strategic position for the long term. It is similar to what happened with communication platforms in other technology contexts. Remember the early days of Slack, when the tool became the standard for communication among tech teams? Band could be aiming for a similar position, just in the universe of AI agents. 🔥
Another important factor is that major players like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are investing heavily in agent frameworks, but none of them are specifically focusing on this inter-agent communication layer as a standalone product. That opens a window of opportunity for an agile and specialized startup to claim this space before the big tech companies decide to build their own proprietary solutions.
What this means for the future of corporate AI
The seed round of $17 million raised by founders from Sygnia and Ermetic is more than just an investment round. It is a clear signal that the market is recognizing communication between AI agents as one of the fundamental missing pieces for the promise of corporate artificial intelligence to become a reality at scale.
We are living through a transitional moment. Companies have moved past the phase of experimenting with individual agents and are entering the phase of orchestrating multiple agents. In this new phase, communication infrastructure stops being a technical detail and becomes the foundation on which the entire ecosystem stands. Without it, scaling AI agents in corporate environments will keep being an expensive, fragile, and limited exercise.
Band enters this landscape with the ingredients the market values: a team with a proven track record in infrastructure and security, enough capital to execute the first phase of the product, and a clear vision about a problem that thousands of companies are already facing. The road to becoming the standard for communication between AI agents is long and full of challenges, but the starting point is solid.
For anyone following the artificial intelligence ecosystem, this is a move worth keeping an eye on. Solving the communication bottleneck between agents could unlock a new wave of corporate automation, finally allowing companies to reap the benefits promised by agentic AI at real scale. And if the history of infrastructure startups teaches us anything, it is that whoever builds the invisible layer that makes everything work tends to reap the biggest rewards in the long run. 🚀
