NeuralTrust's EIC Accelerator Security Gateway for AI Agents

In July 2025, two days after xAI released Grok-4, researchers at a Barcelona start-up got it to explain how to make a Molotov cocktail. A month later they did the same to OpenAI's GPT-5 within hours of its launch, as SecurityWeek and CSO Online reported. The company, NeuralTrust, publishes attacks like these to sell the defence: a gateway that sits between a company's AI agents and the models, tools and data they call, and inspects every request.

The EIC Accelerator selected NeuralTrust at its March 2025 cut-off for blended finance. CORDIS records a grant agreement with Singularly, S.L., the company's legal name at the time, for €2,360,423.54, signed on 1 October 2025 and running from 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2027, under the GenAI4EU challenge for European champions in generative AI. The project is one year into a two-year term, so what it promised can only partly be checked.

A name change and a new board

The company behind the NeuralTrust brand was incorporated in Barcelona in July 2022 as Singularly SL, with €48,000 of share capital and three joint administrators: Joan Vendrell, Victor Manuel Garcia and Ilan Eskinazi, whose appointment was revoked in April 2024. That is what the commercial register entries published in BORME show, as transcribed by Empresia. The Catalan government's start-up directory also lists Singularly, S.L. as the company operating NeuralTrust, founded in 2022. In December 2023 the company was registered as an empresa emergente, the status Spain's 2022 start-up law gives young innovative firms.

On 20 January 2026 the register entered the change of name from Singularly SL to NeuralTrust SL, together with a move of the registered office from Premià de Dalt to Barcelona. Infoempresa lists NeuralTrust SL as active, with its last register announcement published on 22 July 2026. According to Empresia's transcription, that announcement records the company's conversion from two joint administrators to a board, with Vendrell as chair and chief executive, Garcia, Dertium Capital SL, Georgios Dimopoulos and Alexander Meyer-Scharenberg, the Alstin Capital partner quoted in the seed round release, as directors. It also records two capital increases and one reduction.

The register shows nominal capital, not the price investors paid for their shares, so it cannot confirm the size of the round. No filed accounts, staff numbers or revenue figures could be found in the free register extracts checked for this article.

How the gateway works

Most defences for large language models work on the prompt: a filter checks what a user types and what the model answers. The CORDIS objective describes NeuralTrust's approach as three linked modules: a Secure AI Gateway that blocks attacks in real time, algorithmic red teaming that probes a customer's AI systems for weaknesses, and observability for monitoring and tracing what the AI does. The company's claim is that it is "the first to secure all LLM traffic at the infrastructure level" and that it analyses the context of user behaviour rather than single prompts. CORDIS also quotes the company as "outperforming market alternatives in public benchmarks", without naming a benchmark.

The products have since been reorganised around AI agents, the software that acts for a user by calling tools and other systems. In its June 2026 funding release, the company describes TrustGate as a gateway that brokers calls to models, to tools through the Model Context Protocol and to other agents; TrustGuard as a runtime engine that detects and stops threats where agents operate; and TrustLens as a tool for finding agents across a company and tracking their behaviour. It says it inspects millions of agent interactions a day and flags about 1.2% as malicious. No independent measurement of that rate, or of how many attacks the gateway misses, could be found.

The attack research

The clearest public evidence of NeuralTrust's technical work is its offensive research. Its Echo Chamber technique, first described on 23 June 2025, steers a model over several conversation turns with harmless-looking prompts until it produces content it would refuse if asked directly. Against Grok-4, Echo Chamber alone was not enough; combined with Crescendo, a technique Microsoft described in April 2024, it succeeded in the share of attempts shown below, according to the figures SecurityWeek took from NeuralTrust's write-up.

For GPT-5, CSO Online reported that NeuralTrust researchers paired Echo Chamber with a storytelling approach and obtained harmful instructions within hours of the model's launch; the article gives no success rate for that test and reports that OpenAI did not immediately respond. NeuralTrust's own blog post documents the method. The company says Echo Chamber and a later multimodal attack it calls Semantic Chaining are now part of the OWASP AI Security Project taxonomy; that claim was not checked against OWASP for this article.

Customers, investors and analyst reports

On 17 June 2026 NeuralTrust announced a $20 million seed round led by Alstin Capital, with VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund and Finaves, the venture fund of IESE Business School. The company calls it the largest cybersecurity seed round raised by an EU company to date, a description Capital Riesgo and Pulse 2.0 repeat. Reports differ on the currency: the company and both outlets give $20 million, Ara converts it to about €17 million, and the IESE alumni newsletter of July 2026 gives €20 million.

The same release names four customers: Air Europa, Abanca, Iberia and Banc Sabadell, which is also an investor. It says 92% of its customers report annual revenue above $1 billion, 80% are in Europe, and that annual recurring revenue in the first quarter of 2026 was double that of all of 2025. No absolute revenue figure is published. The company also announced that KuppingerCole named it a product and innovation leader in its 2025 Leadership Compass for generative AI defence, and that it appears as a representative vendor in two Gartner market guides; at South Summit Madrid in June 2025 it won the awards for most scalable start-up and best trust tech and data start-up.

One detail differs between the company's own pages: the South Summit announcement of June 2025 names Alejandro Domingo as co-founder and CTO, while the June 2026 release lists Victor Garcia as CTO and Domingo as COO.

The EIC money

The award was selected as blended finance, which pairs the grant with a possible equity investment by the EIC Fund. CORDIS records only the grant. The EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked page by page on 28 October 2026, does not include NeuralTrust or Singularly, and the investors named in the June 2026 round do not include the EIC Fund. Whether an equity investment is still planned is not public. The funding release says the company is also backed by Spain's State Research Agency, without giving an amount; no such award could be found in a web search.

1. Secure AI Gateway with real-time attack blockingOn saleTrustGate and TrustGuard are sold to named customers, per the company; no independent test of blocking rates.
2. Algorithmic red teamingShown in publicJailbreaks of Grok-4 and GPT-5 reported by SecurityWeek and CSO Online.
3. Observability and traceabilityAnnouncedTrustLens described in the June 2026 release; no customer case published.
4. Outperforming alternatives in public benchmarksNot shownCORDIS names no benchmark, and no third-party benchmark result could be found.
5. Project resultsToo earlyCORDIS shows no periodic report; the project runs to October 2027.

The European case

NeuralTrust was funded under GenAI4EU, which the European Commission launched in January 2024 to spread generative AI through European industry and public administration. Securing those systems is also a legal requirement: Article 15 of the AI Act obliges providers of high-risk AI systems to make them resilient against attempts by unauthorised third parties to alter their use, including inputs designed to make a model err. A European supplier that banks and airlines can audit fits both aims. The market NeuralTrust sells into is crowded: the same KuppingerCole report, its first on the category, also named F5 a product, innovation and market leader, per F5.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.