Certiv, an AI security startup, has emerged from stealth with $4.2 million in pre-seed funding to introduce a new category focused on governing and securing autonomous AI agents operating inside enterprises.
The round included backing from Aviso Ventures, Founders Co-op, Fortson, and other strategic investors. The company plans to use the funding to expand its engineering team and support early enterprise deployments of its platform.
Founded to address the growing risks associated with agentic AI systems, Certiv has developed what it describes as a “runtime assurance layer” for AI agents. The platform is designed to help organizations discover, understand, control, and protect AI-driven workflows as these systems increasingly execute tasks such as writing code, accessing files, calling APIs, and interacting with sensitive enterprise systems.
Certiv’s approach centers on installing directly on employee workstations across Windows, Mac, and Linux environments. From this position, the platform can intercept and govern agent actions in real time before they reach production systems. It provides capabilities to monitor agent behavior, evaluate risk, enforce policies, and stop potentially harmful actions before they occur.
The company is targeting enterprises adopting tools like Claude Code, OpenClaw, GitHub Copilot Workspace, and OpenAI Codex, which are expanding the scope of autonomous software but also introducing new operational and security challenges. Traditional security systems, according to Certiv, are not designed to understand or control non-deterministic AI agents that can chain actions across systems at machine speed.
Certiv is headquartered in Seattle and is currently working with early customers to secure AI agents across development, operations, and knowledge workflows.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI agents represent one of the most important technology shifts in decades. Because they are non-deterministic, enterprises need new controls to govern these autonomous systems. Certiv brings deep expertise across AI, security, and infrastructure to secure agents from the ground up, starting with the employee workstation.”
Andrew Peterson, Aviso Ventures
“Traditional security tools were built for human-driven software. Certiv sits in front of agent execution, understands why decisions are made, and governs what agents are allowed to do. It is a new security layer purpose-built for AI agents like OpenClaw and Claude Code.”
Jason Needham, CEO and Co-Founder of Certiv
