Singapore cybersecurity firm Flexxon has won funding under the Cybersecurity Industry Call for Innovation (CyberCall) for the third time, this time to build hardware-level security for AI agents. The award was announced at CyberSG Innovation Day on 10 November by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the CyberSG Talent, Innovation and Growth Collaboration Centre (TIG Centre).
Key Takeaways
- Flexxon’s X-PHY AI Armor will secure AI agents at the hardware level under CyberCall’s Cybersecurity for AI challenge.
- It is Flexxon’s third CyberCall award, after the X-PHY SSD in 2019 and a server security project in 2021.
- AI Armor will act as a hardware-rooted Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway between agents and the systems they reach.
X-PHY AI Armor: hardware-level AI agent security
X-PHY AI Armor is designed as a hardware-rooted secure Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway. It will sit between an AI agent and the systems it reaches, inspecting each request for injected instructions and hijacked tools. Anything high-risk will be passed to the hardware, which will lock it down.
Because authorisation will be anchored in X-PHY hardware rather than software, a stolen credential alone will not be enough to get through. Flexxon says generic API gateways inspect traffic at the network layer and can be reconfigured by anyone who controls the host. Under its design, the device verifies authorisation for high-risk operations and writes the audit record, so an attacker who controls the host cannot alter the decision or erase the trace.
Flexxon co-founder and CEO Camellia Chan said software cannot be asked to police itself, because “the judgement has to sit somewhere an attacker cannot reach.”
Why AI agent security is a growing concern
AI agents hold credentials and act on text instructions, and that text can be poisoned. According to Flexxon, a single injected line in a document, web page or another agent’s reply can redirect an agent while every action it takes remains technically authorised.
CSA’s Singapore Cyber Landscape 2025/2026 report, published in June, warned that agentic AI could shorten intrusions that once took days to a matter of hours. Separately, CSA’s Singapore Cybersecurity Health Report 2025, published in October, surveyed 2,005 businesses and non-profits and found almost nine in 10 had encountered at least one cybersecurity incident during the year.
Third CyberCall award for Flexxon
Flexxon was one of eight companies selected from 72 submissions in 2019 for its X-PHY solid state drive, and an awardee in 2021 for a server security module. Since 2024, CyberCall has been organised by the TIG Centre, a joint initiative of the National University of Singapore and CSA.
Willis Lim, Executive Director of the TIG Centre, said securing AI agents “will be a major cybersecurity challenge in the coming years” and is the kind of problem CyberCall was set up to address.
Flexxon will develop X-PHY AI Armor with CyberCall support, building on its existing hardware cybersecurity work. The company did not give a delivery timeline.
