As AI rewrites the rules of enterprise risk, Lyo understands, monitors and protects data 24/7 across environments
Relyance AI, the first AI-native data security platform that attaches context to data visibility, announced the commercial availability of Lyo, the industry’s first autonomous data defense engineer designed to monitor and secure how AI agents interact with enterprise data.
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“Lyo closes the gap between threat detection and action as we scale agentic AI across our organization,” said Karthik Chakkarapani, SVP Corporate Operations & CIO, Zuora.
Lyo emerges at an inflection point for the cybersecurity industry as autonomous AI agents spread across enterprise environments — gaining access to sensitive data, triggering workflows, provisioning infrastructure, and calling APIs at machine speed. The challenge is no longer locating sensitive data, but understanding how it is being used in real time; something legacy scanning tools, built to show where data lives, were never designed to do. Without context — identity, purpose, flow, and behavior — security teams are left with a dangerous blind spot and a false sense of control. Gartner predicts that by 2027, more than 40% of AI-related data breaches will stem from improper GenAI use alone.
Lyo was built to address this new reality. Powered by Relyance’s AI Data Journeys™, Lyo continuously monitors and attaches business and behavioral context to data activity across code, cloud infrastructure, MCP servers, SaaS applications, identities, third parties, and AI agents.
“The majority of security tools today are scanners built for static environments. That model breaks with AI agents,” said Karthik Chakkarapani, SVP Corporate Operations & CIO, Zuora. “Lyo closes the gap between threat detection and action as we scale agentic AI across our organization. Within 15 minutes of implementation, all of our critical workflows were not only monitored, but contextually understood.”
Meet Lyo: 24/7 Autonomous Data Security
AI agents introduce specific failure opportunities: overprivileged access, hidden non-deterministic data flows, poisoned inputs, third-party model exposure, ephemeral infrastructure, and unpredictable data behavior. Powered by Relyance’s Data Exposure Graph, Data Journeys, Lyo simultaneously monitors an entire data ecosystem, with the following capabilities:
- Unified AI and Data Visibility: Provides comprehensive visibility into both AI and non-AI assets, creating a complete map of your technology stack showing how AI systems and data assets interact.
- Identity-to-Data Intelligence: Maps relationships between AI agents and data assets to identify risky combinations. Identifies when AI agents have overprivileged access to sensitive data.
- Enhanced Contextual Data Classification: Categorizes data sensitivity levels and tracks data flows. Identifies which assets house highly sensitive data and monitors how AI agents interact with that data.
- 24/7 Monitoring & Policy Alerts: Continuously monitors for threats with proactive alerting for security policy violations with unified risk intelligence across data, identity, AI, and behavior.
- Conversational Investigation (Ask Lyo): Answers questions via a natural language query interface to help teams prioritize which issues require immediate action, what has the most potential damage/impact, and provides context for security decisions.
- Third-Party Vendor Risk Management: Identifies and monitors vendor-supplied AI components to manage vendor security risks, including third-party MCP servers.
“Security teams are being asked to defend systems they can’t fully see,” said Abhi Sharma, CEO and Cofounder of Relyance AI. “Lyo is built on a different premise. We believe that context is the only thing that separates a scanner from true defense. In this environment, visibility does not equate to control. CISOs need context to understand what AI agents are doing with their data, and whether those actions align with business and compliance policies. Lyo delivers that context 24/7.”
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