Manifold, an AI detection and response platform designed to secure autonomous AI on 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 prominent angel investors also joined the round, including former Uber CSO Joe Sullivan and former Google DeepMind CISO Vijay Bolina.
The company’s platform, known as agentic AI Detection and Response (AIDR), is built to address the risks posed by the growing use of autonomous AI agents across enterprise environments.
As AI adoption accelerates — with 85% of developers already relying on coding agents such as GitHub Copilot, Claude Code and Cursor — Manifold argues that the attack surface is expanding faster than existing security tooling can handle.
Coding agents routinely access source code, production systems and CI/CD pipelines, yet operate with little visibility or effective controls. As agentic AI spreads beyond engineering teams to knowledge workers more broadly, the company believes the need for dedicated runtime security has become critical.
The fresh capital will be used to accelerate development of the AIDR platform, which is designed to give enterprise security teams real-time visibility into what AI agents are actually doing — the tools they call, the systems they access and the actions they take.
Manifold maps every agent in a given environment and its connections to MCP servers, databases and external systems, flagging anomalies as soon as behaviour deviates from the norm. The platform is agentless and can be deployed within days using existing infrastructure, without requiring new architecture, gateways or proxies.
The company was founded by Neal Swaelens, Oleksandr Yaremchuk and Michael McKenna, who each bring significant background in 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 two later met McKenna following Laiyer AI’s acquisition by Protect AI, which was itself subsequently acquired by Palo Alto Networks. Together, the trio identified a blind spot in first-generation AI security tooling, which was built to monitor text prompts and model outputs at the inference point and remains ill-equipped to track the actions of AI agents operating beyond that boundary.
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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