Snyk, the London-born cybersecurity unicorn, has announced the acquisition of Invariant Labs, an AI-powered security research firm headquartered in Zurich.

The acquisition of Invariant Labs, which specialises in developing safeguards against emerging AI threats, will help drive forward Snyk’s new research arm, Snyk Labs, which will focus on advancing AI security delivered through its AI Trust Platform.

With the deal, Snyk plans to bring together a team of researchers with a proven track record of industry-first intelligence on agentic attack vectors, with the team at Invariant Labs having discovered and named emerging attack terminology such as “tool poisoning” and “MCP rug pulls.”

According to Snyk, the deal will allow the firm to extend its single-platform approach to software development security, helping its more than 4,500 global customers secure next-gen AI-native and agentic applications, including LLMs and autonomous agents, and allow the cyber company to stay at the forefront of research on evolving risks.

“With Invariant Labs, we’re accelerating our ability to identify, prioritise, and neutralise the next generation of agentic AI threats before they reach production,” said Manoj Nair, chief innovation officer at Snyk. 

“This acquisition also underscores Snyk’s proactive commitment to supporting security teams navigating the urgent and unfamiliar risks of AI-native software, which is rapidly becoming the new software development default.”

With the deal, Snyk takes command of Guardrails, a new security product introduced by Invariant Labs earlier this year. 

Dubbed a ‘contextual security layer for the agentic era’, the Guardrails system allows agent builders and software engineers to augment existing AI systems with strong security safeguards.

Designed to provide a flexible framework for ensuring the safety and reliability of AI agents, the system takes into account contextual information, static scans of agent tools and implementations, runtime information, human annotations, and incident databases.

With studies showing that the current wave of AI agents could be a weak link in cybersecurity, these kinds of safeguards may soon become a staple of many firms’ security stacks.

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“We’ve spent years researching and building the frameworks necessary to secure the AI-native future,” said Marc Fischer, CEO & co-founder of Invariant Labs. 

“We must understand that agent-based AI systems are a powerful new class of software, especially autonomous ones, and demand greater oversight and stronger security guarantees than traditional approaches. 

“We’re excited to join the Snyk team, as this mindset is deeply aligned with their mission.”