From Pilot to Production: Real Agentic Deployments in Enterprises
Aug 5, 2026: Dr. Chenxi Wang joined NVIDIA Senior Director of Engineering Jasmine Jaksic at Black Hat to discuss how AI agents are actually moving from experimentation into enterprise production, drawing on Chenxi’s interviews with 28 AI leaders across global enterprises and Jasmine’s practitioner experience at NVIDIA.
Key findings: successful use cases tend to be bounded, high-volume, repeatable, auditable, and reversible; autonomy exists on a spectrum; and long-horizon agentic tasks are emerging as the next frontier.
Biggest takeaway: scaled agentic adoption will require a mature enterprise control plane for agent identity, authorization, control, observability, and accountability.
Rain Capital Selected for the 2026 RAISE Select Cohort
Aug 7, 2026: Rain Capital was selected for the 2026 RAISE Select cohort, joining 101 emerging managers chosen by the RAISE Global LP Selection Committee, made up of 70+ leading LPs.
The recognition reflects Rain’s focus on partnering with early-stage founders building at the frontier of cybersecurity, healthtech, and AI infrastructure.
Rain will join the RAISE community and 330+ LPs at the RAISE Global Summit on October 22 at the Presidio in San Francisco.
Chenxi Wang Named One of the Top 10 Influential Women in Cybersecurity
EM360Tech named Chenxi one of its Top 10 Influential Women in Cybersecurity for 2026.
The recognition highlights Chenxi’s work across cybersecurity, AI, and venture capital, from investing in the next generation of security companies to contributing to industry conversations around emerging technology.
Brief congratulations + Rain perspective; keep this section short since it is primarily a recognition announcement rather than a major story.
Chenxi on ISMG: The Future of AI and Cybersecurity
Chenxi sat down with Tom Field of ISMG at Black Hat to discuss how the rapid evolution of AI is reshaping cybersecurity, enterprise technology, and investing.
Key themes included AI accelerating both attack and defense, agents moving toward greater autonomy, and the importance of open-weight AI and global talent to U.S. competitiveness.
Chenxi also discussed universities as an important source of breakthrough AI innovation and why, in a market moving this quickly, exceptional founders can matter more than perfectly timing the market.
Latest Podcast: Security in the Age of AI Acceleration
David B. Cross, Venture Partner at Rain Capital and CISO, joined the hosts of the Cyber Smokehouse in exposing how the rapid acceleration of AI is fundamentally destabilizing traditional enterprise defenses. As adversaries deploy autonomous models, security teams now face a wave of machine-speed, agentic threats that completely outpace legacy controls. Manual oversight and static rules are no longer enough to monitor, detect, and contain these complex, self-directed vectors.
Major Takeaway: This is precisely where Guardian Agents like Manifold become critical, delivering the real-time visibility and active governance needed to secure automated environments. Embracing these advanced protective frameworks is essential for CISOs aiming to stay ahead of the next generation of AI-driven attacks.
Identity, authorization, control, observability, and accountability aren't five parts of one control plane, they're five different maturity levels, and the cheap ones ship first. Observability and accountability are logging, they cost nothing and never block a demo. Authorization and control mean the call doesn't complete until a check clears, which is latency someone has to eat. When you're diligencing a company that claims all five, the sharper question isn't whether they have a control plane, it's which of the five are actually inline in the agent's execution path versus just an audit trail bolted on after the fact.