Manifold, an AI Detection and Response platform focused on securing autonomous AI on enterprise endpoints, announced it has raised $8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Cherry Ventures, Rain Capital, Modern Technical Fund, and several notable angel investors. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate development of its agentic AI Detection and Response platform, which is designed to help organizations manage the risks associated with rapidly expanding use of autonomous AI agents.
The funding comes at a time when AI adoption is accelerating across enterprises. Developers are already heavily reliant on coding agents, and the use of similar tools is expanding to a broader range of knowledge workers. These agents increasingly have access to sensitive systems such as production environments, source code repositories, and CI/CD pipelines. Traditional endpoint detection and response systems often struggle to distinguish between legitimate developer activity and malicious behavior, leading to blind spots that are now being amplified by autonomous agents performing similar actions.
Manifold aims to address this gap by providing runtime visibility into what AI agents are actually doing. Its platform tracks the tools agents use, the systems they access, and the actions they take, allowing security teams to map agent behavior in real time. The system is designed to flag anomalies as they occur, enabling organizations to define normal activity patterns and quickly detect potentially risky behavior. The platform operates without requiring additional infrastructure such as gateways or proxies, and can be deployed using existing systems.
The company was founded by Neal Swaelens, Oleksandr Yaremchuk, and Michael McKenna, who bring experience in AI security. Swaelens and Yaremchuk previously co-founded Laiyer AI, where they developed LLM Guard, an open-source LLM firewall. Following Laiyer AI’s acquisition and subsequent developments in the space, the founders identified a growing need for security solutions tailored specifically to agentic AI systems that execute actions rather than simply generate text.
As enterprises continue to adopt AI agents across functions, the attack surface is expanding. Existing security tools, which are largely built to monitor prompts and outputs at the model level, do not provide visibility into downstream actions taken by agents. Manifold’s approach focuses on monitoring behavior at runtime, offering a new layer of security intended to keep pace with the operational realities of autonomous AI in enterprise environments.
KEY QUOTES:
“Every developer today has coding agents on their laptop with access to source code, production systems, and CI/CD pipelines connected to an expanding ecosystem of MCP servers, skills, and third-party tools that no one is inspecting. With the rise of Claude Cowork, OpenClaw, and others, that same pattern is about to hit every knowledge worker. These agents don’t just talk, they execute. First-generation AI security tooling was not designed to solve for this. That’s the problem Manifold was built to solve.”
Neal Swaelens, CEO And Co-Founder, Manifold
“There’s an open window to define the category for agentic security now, but it won’t be open long. Endpoint agent security is the next major layer of enterprise infrastructure. This team already built foundational AI security tooling and deployed it at massive scale. They know precisely where the previous generation fails. We believe they will own what comes next.”
John Cowgill, Partner At Costanoa Ventures
