Press Release
JetStream Security Named to the 2026 Intelligent Applications 40
Madrona's sixth annual list of the top private AI companies now treats trust and governance as a category of its own.
JetStream Security has been named to the 2026 Intelligent Applications 40, the sixth annual list of the private companies building and enabling applied AI, published by Seattle venture capital firm Madrona. JetStream placed sixth among the 11 Early-stage winners, the band for companies that have raised up to $50 million. The list was released on August 31, 2026.
The winners are picked by the investors who fund this market. Madrona gathered nominations on more than 450 companies from 72 venture investors across 54 firms, then weighted the category voting with analytics from PitchBook’s Venture Exit Predictor. Multiple effective ties produced 45 winners this year instead of the usual 40.
Matt McIlwain, a managing director at Madrona, announced the list on Bloomberg Tech on the morning of August 31. Through Madrona’s partnership with the New York Stock Exchange, the winners ran on the screens above the NYSE trading floor and on a billboard in Times Square, at the northeast corner of 47th Street and Seventh Avenue.
Trust and governance became a category
The ranking matters less than what Madrona said about the shape of the market. One of the firm’s stated takeaways from this year’s list is that “AI trust, governance, and security has become its own category, not just a feature.” Writing up the results, Matt McIlwain and Rolanda Fu grouped JetStream with Fable Security and AI Underwriting Company as three companies that “exist purely to make enterprises comfortable deploying autonomous AI agents,” covering governance and visibility, human risk management, and insurance and certification respectively.
Three of the 11 Early-stage winners are AI-risk infrastructure companies. That is a market telling investors what it is stuck on. Madrona’s enterprise survey puts the same finding in buying terms: data security and privacy is the No. 1 overall purchase criteria when enterprises buy AI, and it ranks among the top three for 78% of enterprises.
This is the argument JetStream was founded on. AI adoption does not stall because the technology fails. It stalls because ownership, accountability, and control are not in place, and most enterprises have no infrastructure for putting them in place.
What we are building
JetStream is the control plane for enterprise AI. The Security-first AI Governance (SAIG) platform gives security teams an inventory of every AI asset in the environment with JetStream AI Manifest™, a versioned record of how agentic components are supposed to work together with JetStream AI Blueprints™, and an alert the moment real behavior diverges from the approved design with JetStream AI Drift Detection™. Every action stays tied to an accountable identity.
McIlwain and Fu also noted that both security companies in the Early band were built by veterans of category-defining security companies, naming CrowdStrike, Attivo, SentinelOne, and Abnormal Security among them.
Enterprises are not slowing down. Madrona found that 74% plan to expand AI budgets over the next year. What they need is a way to move that fast without losing track of what their agents are doing, and who authorized it.
Governance is not the brake. It is what clears the path.
