Founder // Startup - Cybersecurity for the Agentic Web - Cohort V in London

This is NOT a traditional paid employment opportunity. It is an opportunity to explore your business idea and build your startup as a founder, with the support of people who have done this before and will go through the journey with you.

Who are we? embryōnic is a venture studio based in London, specialised in the zero-to-one stage. We join problem-centric founders to help them validate their concept, test for early traction signals and when the time feels right, we build and co-found the business with them to take it to market and find product-market-fit. We assign an embedded Squad and deploy our venture hatching playbook. Our sister company (Founders Studio I LLC) acts as the first investor and writes the first-check into the business in three Stage Gates to cover for the studio expenses, AI compute, kick off, de-risk the venture and eventually build a first viable version of the product. Should the venture get traction, you keep up to 70% equity in the business.

Cohort Theme: Cybersecurity for the Agentic Web

Cohort Thesis: Every new agentic primitive - MCP servers, skill files, A2A protocols, A2P payment rails - expands the attack surface faster than enterprise security stacks can adapt. Prompt injection, tool poisoning, and cross-agent privilege escalation are the new SQL injection, and current EDR/IAM tooling is structurally blind to them. We invest in founders building the security layer native to this stack: runtime guardrails, agent identity and authorization, MCP supply-chain integrity, and observability for non-deterministic systems. The opportunity mirrors cloud security circa 2014 — a category-defining decade for teams who arrive early with the right primitives.

What are we looking for? We are looking for technical entrepreneurs who have the ambition to build security infrastructure and tools that protect the emerging agentic web - by applying AI and modern security principles to the unique vulnerabilities introduced when autonomous agents act, communicate, and make decisions on behalf of users and organizations. Examples in this category include: Security layers for MCP servers, skills, and tool integrations that enforce access control, input validation, sandboxing, and abuse prevention; authentication and authorization frameworks that establish trust between agents, platforms, and users in complex multi-agent systems; and threat detection and response tools that monitor agentic pipelines for prompt injection attacks, data exfiltration, and misuse in real time, amongst others - all operated through B2B or B2B2C business models only.

You are a technical operator and already work in cybersecurity. If you have identified a security problem worth solving within the agentic AI ecosystem, and you're ready to explore a concept and figure out if this is the right time to fully dedicate your time and energy to building a solution that secures the next generation of the web - apply today. Maybe you are still in a job and thinking of quitting, or already have done so. Maybe you are a serial entrepreneur and you are after the next gig. Maybe you have found one or more problems you think it’s worth solving for. Maybe you don’t know yet which one makes the most sense to focus on.

A few things we are sure of:

• You have a remarkable sense of purpose.
• You are in love with the problem you have spotted, much more than the solution / idea itself.
• You want to listen to your potential users / customers (a.k.a. you don't think you are smarter than everybody else, and have no fear of getting rejected.)
• You value testing hypotheses over perfectionism.
• You love crafting and iterating over time.
• You are not afraid of receiving "tough love" from your team, users or customers.
• Respectful and appreciate the work and time of others.

Details of the programme: We are joining one new founder (or co-founding team) with specific insights in this category. You don’t need to quit your job yet, but you have the ambition to do so when the time is right. The cohort will be open for applications submitted from June 1st to June 30, 2026. We hatch ventures in 3 Stage Gates and deploy capital progressively to cover the studio services and risk with you. We will start with all the problems you are looking to address with the product and help you validate if they are problems worth pursuing. The goal of this stage is to fully understand the problem, the market you’re entering and the users you will be serving. In the second stage, we’ll aim to test for the problem-solution fit. A first Assumption Product will be deployed as an experiment to assess the core experience assumptions, and perform customer development activities. Should the signals be the right ones, we then spin off the venture together, build a scalable baseline of the product and prove revenue traction. If the venture gets traction, you’ll keep up to 70% equity in the business and decide if to fundraise further or keep bootstrapping.

We are a team with over 20 years of combined experience in the zero-to-one stage, with a track record in validating, iterating and taking products to market. Products we worked on range from pre-product ideas, all the way to pre-IPO. We are specialised in Product-led Growth. We’ve tested and improved a repeatable system and named it "Kinetic V^2" - Its name is a reflection of the focus we place on optimising for learning rate acceleration to achieve escape velocity state. It's based on 3 Pillars: Principles, Learning Velocity Tracking and Stage Gates. We provide a rotating fractional team that allows you access to the capabilities you need, when you need it, so you can avoid the overhead count until you’re ready for it and the product demands it. We have partnered with Hyperscalers and AI Perks to provide AI Compute Tokens and other perks to deploy on the ventures we work with. We cover Product, Technology, Finance and Growth.

How to apply: Complete the application form.