The big picture: AI agents like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot are the enterprise’s “new workers,” but they operate with autonomous access to code, sensitive files, and employee credentials. Traditional security tools are often blind to their non-deterministic reasoning. Certiv is building a “runtime assurance” layer that lives directly on employee workstations to monitor and control agent behavior in real time.
Why it matters:
- Visibility Gap: Cloud and network-level tools can miss local agent activity. Certiv detects “shadow agents” running on individual machines before they can reach production systems.
- Intent vs. Action: Rather than just logging activity after the fact, the platform tracks an agent’s full “chain of reasoning” to understand why it is performing a task, blocking actions that violate company policy.
- Seattle Pedigree: Led by F5 and Apple veterans, the team is positioning endpoint security as the only way to truly govern autonomous software that operates at machine speed.
How it works:
- Workstation Gatekeeper: Installs natively on Windows, Mac, and Linux to act as a policy enforcement point between the agent and the system.
- Runtime Assurance: Intercepts tool calls and API requests, scoring them for risk and evaluating them against deterministic and intent-based rules.
- Centralized Governance: Provides a unified dashboard to discover every agent, model, and usage pattern across the organization’s entire endpoint fleet.
The catch: Certiv enters a hyper-competitive “agent defense” market where rivals like Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia’s new venture and Onyx Security are raising hundreds of millions. To win, Certiv must prove that the performance overhead of a local endpoint agent is a price enterprises are willing to pay for granular control. Much like the hurdles in on-device verification, the challenge lies in maintaining human-level accuracy across thousands of diverse hardware configurations without slowing down the developer’s workflow.
Key Details
- Funding: $4.2M (Pre-Seed)
- Lead: Aviso Ventures, Founders Co-op
- CEO: Jason Needham
- Sector: Cybersecurity / AI Agents
