Manifold, an AI detection and response platform designed to secure autonomous AI on enterprise endpoints, has closed an $8m seed funding round.
The round was led by Costanoa Ventures, with participation from Cherry Ventures, Rain Capital and Modern Technical Fund. A number of notable angel investors also took part, including former Uber CSO Joe Sullivan and former Google DeepMind CISO Vijay Bolina.
The company’s platform — known as its agentic AI Detection and Response (AIDR) system — is built to address the growing risks posed by autonomous AI agents operating across enterprise environments.
As AI adoption accelerates, tools such as coding agents have become ubiquitous, with 85% of developers now relying on tools like GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Cursor. Manifold argues that this trend is set to extend well beyond engineering teams to every knowledge worker, driven by the rise of platforms such as Claude Cowork and OpenClaw.
The challenge, as Manifold sees it, is that coding agents perform many of the same tasks — reading codebases, executing shell commands, making API calls — that already trigger security alerts, yet often operate with broad access to production systems, source code and CI/CD pipelines with little oversight.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate development of the AIDR platform, enabling enterprises to deploy agentic AI at scale whilst maintaining meaningful security controls and visibility across their endpoint environments.
Manifold was co-founded by Neal Swaelens, Oleksandr Yaremchuk and Michael McKenna, all of whom have backgrounds in foundational AI security. Swaelens and Yaremchuk previously co-founded Laiyer AI, where they developed LLM Guard, widely regarded as the most adopted open-source LLM firewall available.
The pair met McKenna after Laiyer AI was acquired by Protect AI, which was subsequently acquired by Palo Alto Networks. Together, the three identified what they describe as a critical blind spot: existing AI security tooling was built to monitor text prompts and model outputs at the inference layer, leaving agentic activity — the actual tools called, systems accessed and actions taken — largely invisible to security teams.
Manifold’s platform aims to fill that gap, offering real-time visibility into agent behaviour, connections to MCP servers, databases and external systems, and automatic flagging of anomalous activity. Notably, the solution is agentless and designed to deploy within days using existing infrastructure, requiring no new architecture, gateways or proxies.
Manifold CEO and co-founder Neal Swaelens said, “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.”
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