LayerX, the Tokyo company behind the Bakuraku back-office software, announced on April 23, 2026 that it had brought AgenticSec, a startup that automates penetration testing with AI agents, into its group. It is LayerX's first acquisition and its first move into security. Terms were not disclosed.
AgenticSec, based in Shibuya, Tokyo, was incorporated on June 9, 2025 and is led by CEO Sho Nakatani. The company had been called SecDevLab until it changed its name to AgenticSec on April 17, 2026, a few days before the deal, according to ITmedia.
LayerX said it treats M&A as one of its main growth strategies and plans to keep pursuing deals, both in areas that are becoming more important because of AI and in areas next to its existing businesses. AgenticSec is hiring under the LayerX group.
What AgenticSec built
AgenticSec's product, AgenticSec Pentest, is built on a fully automated penetration testing framework. A penetration test is a simulated attack used to find weaknesses in a system. The user supplies only an IP address, and AI agents analyse the attack surface on their own, find vulnerabilities and intrusion paths, and work toward internal access without a human in the loop.
The company says the approach allows penetration tests to be run as often as a security scanner, rather than as occasional projects carried out by specialist consultants. The agents can also build attack scenarios that take into account a system's configuration and the results of earlier tests.
Nakatani has worked on AI-based penetration testing research for several years. In 2025 he presented at the Black Hat USA 2025 Arsenal and published papers on automating penetration tests with agents based on large language models. The company says it was the first in the world to fully automate the initial intrusion stage of a penetration test with AI, and it has filed patent applications for its core technology.
Why LayerX is buying
LayerX describes itself as an AI company whose mission is to digitise all economic activity. Besides Bakuraku, which offers AI agents for back-office work, it runs a fintech business that includes the ALTERNA asset management service and an enterprise AI platform called Ai Workforce. The company was founded in August 2018 and is led by CEO Yoshinori Fukushima and CTO Yuki Matsumoto.
In the announcement, LayerX said AI and coding agents have sharply increased how fast software is written, which makes checking and safely operating that software a more pressing problem for businesses. Matsumoto added that advanced AI being used by attackers, citing the arrival of Anthropic's Claude Mythos as an example, has made software security more important than before. He said LayerX would work with AgenticSec to support the safe operation of software in Japan.
The founder's view of the market
Nakatani said in the announcement that defenders are in an asymmetric fight with attackers, who have adopted generative AI and automation quickly. He pointed to growing awareness of cyber resilience and to Japan's Financial Services Agency recommending threat-led penetration testing as reasons he expects the market to grow.
He argued that traditional penetration testing done by highly skilled people is limited by cost, by how often it can be run and by a shortage of security specialists, and that AI agents can close that gap. He said he has known Fukushima and Matsumoto since their student days and decided that joining LayerX would get AgenticSec's technology to more customers faster.
What was not disclosed
Neither company disclosed the price, the size of LayerX's stake, AgenticSec's headcount or any outside funding the startup had raised. LayerX's release described AgenticSec as joining its group and did not say whether the AgenticSec brand would change. It also gave no details on how AgenticSec Pentest would be sold alongside Bakuraku or Ai Workforce, or whether existing AgenticSec customers would see any changes to their contracts.
