“In 2025, the cybersecurity sector witnessed an unprecedented $119 billion deployed across more than 1,200 transactions, marking the most active year in history. Momentum Cyber’s upcoming AIxCYBER event on March 12, 2026, in Austin will dissect how agentic AI is transforming both threats and defenses, forcing a repricing of cybersecurity as essential infrastructure for the AI-driven economy. With strategic acquirers dominating deals and AI security emerging as the hottest funding category, the panel will explore the convergence of rapid AI adoption, architectural divides in enterprises, and massive capital flows reshaping the industry.”
The $119 Billion Bet: Agentic AI’s Impact on Cybersecurity
The cybersecurity landscape in 2025 shattered previous records, with total capital deployment reaching $119 billion across 1,222 transactions. This figure encompasses mergers and acquisitions (M&A), financings, and other strategic activities, representing a dramatic escalation from prior years. M&A deal value surged dramatically, with strategic acquirers capturing the lion’s share—around 92% of disclosed value—highlighting how large technology platforms view cybersecurity not as an add-on but as core to their competitive positioning in an AI-centric world.
Financing activity was equally robust, with approximately 820 rounds raising over $20 billion, a significant increase driven by investor enthusiasm for AI-native solutions. AI security stood out as the dominant category, attracting 144 financing rounds, including a heavy emphasis on early-stage deals. This shift underscores a broader trend: investors are betting heavily on technologies that can secure AI systems themselves while leveraging AI for enhanced protection.
At the center of this capital explosion is agentic AI —autonomous systems capable of planning, decision-making, and executing complex tasks with minimal human oversight. Unlike traditional generative AI, which produces outputs based on prompts, agentic AI operates as independent agents that interact with environments, adapt in real time, and pursue goals dynamically. This capability is rewriting the threat landscape in profound ways.
On the offensive side, adversaries are harnessing agentic AI to automate and accelerate attacks. These systems can perform reconnaissance at scale, identify vulnerabilities faster than human operators, generate polymorphic malware that evolves to evade detection, orchestrate multi-stage exploit chains, and even coordinate swarms of agents for persistent campaigns. The barrier to entry for sophisticated cybercrime has lowered dramatically; a single operator can now direct autonomous tools to probe, infiltrate, and exfiltrate data with adaptive tactics that respond to defenses in real time. Emerging risks include prompt injection attacks that manipulate agent behavior, memory poisoning to corrupt decision-making processes, tool misuse leading to privilege escalation, and cascading failures across interconnected agents.
For defenders, agentic AI presents both opportunity and urgency. Enterprises are rapidly deploying these agents to automate workflows, boost productivity, and handle complex operations across IT, security operations centers (SOCs), and beyond. However, this proliferation creates an expanded attack surface: non-human identities (such as API keys, service accounts, and autonomous agents) multiply exponentially, often without adequate governance or visibility. Shadow AI usage—agents deployed without IT approval—exacerbates the problem, turning internal tools into potential insider threats or data leakage vectors.
The architectural divide in enterprises compounds these challenges. Legacy security models, built around perimeter defenses and rule-based detection, struggle against dynamic, agent-driven environments. Cloud-first, multi-hybrid setups demand unified visibility across data, identity, applications, and AI workloads. Without this, gaps emerge where agents can be compromised or misused. Zero-trust architectures, behavioral anomaly detection, and runtime controls are gaining traction as necessities, not luxuries.
Momentum Cyber’s AIxCYBER event, set for March 12, 2026, in Austin, Texas, brings together platform builders, AI-native founders, venture capitalists, and enterprise security leaders to unpack these dynamics. Moderated by Momentum Cyber Founder and CEO Eric McAlpine, the panel titled “The $119 Billion Bet: Why Agentic AI Just Made Cybersecurity the Most Strategic and Valuable Market in Tech” draws from the firm’s 2026 Cybersecurity Almanac. Discussions will center on three interlocking forces:
The AI Landscape Shock — Rapid enterprise adoption of agentic systems is expanding attack surfaces while enabling more sophisticated threats.
Widening Architectural Divide — Enterprises face a growing split between legacy infrastructures and AI-native requirements, demanding new control layers for data, models, agents, and runtime environments.
Unprecedented Financial Environment — The $119 billion deployment signals a repricing of cybersecurity as foundational infrastructure for the AI economy, with premium valuations for platforms that deliver scalable, autonomous protection.
Key data points from 2025 illustrate the momentum:
M&A Dominance : Strategic buyers drove consolidation, with several billion-dollar-plus deals reflecting platform expansion strategies.
Funding Concentration : AI security overtook other categories, with early-stage innovation drawing heavy capital as founders build solutions at unprecedented speed—some reaching significant annual recurring revenue in under a year thanks to agentic development acceleration.
Two-Tier Market Emergence : High-growth, AI-focused players command premium multiples, while slower-growth segments face pressure.
Looking ahead, 2026 promises continued intensity. Pipeline strength in AI-native platforms, governance tools, and cloud architectures suggests sustained demand. As agentic AI becomes pervasive, cybersecurity shifts from a defensive cost center to a strategic enabler of the digital economy. Organizations that integrate autonomous defenses—agentic security tools for triage, investigation, remediation, and proactive threat hunting—will gain an edge in outpacing evolving risks.
The stakes are clear: cybersecurity is no longer peripheral; it is the insurance layer for AI-era infrastructure, protecting training data, model intellectual property, software supply chains, and enterprise operations at machine speed. The $119 billion bet in 2025 was just the opening wager in what promises to be a multi-year supercycle.
Disclaimer : This is a news and analysis report based on industry trends and data. It is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, or professional advice.