Runtime assurance that authorizes each AI agent action on the endpoint before it executes

Certiv was founded in Seattle in 2025 by Jason Needham, Paul Allen, and Daniel Morris. Needham previously co-founded Union Bay Networks, acquired by Apple in 2014, and CloudCoreo, acquired by VMware in 2018; Allen was CloudCoreo's co-founder and CTO and later a distinguished engineer at Broadcom; Morris spent seven years at Microsoft working on AI and developer tools. The company emerged from stealth in March 2026 with $4.2M in pre-seed funding from Fortson VC, Founders' Co-op, and Aviso Ventures, describing its product as a runtime assurance layer for AI agents and positioning it apart from AI gateways, EDR, proxies, and observability tools.

The product runs where the agents actually execute: employee machines across macOS, Windows, and Linux, and containerised workloads. It discovers both approved agents and unsanctioned ones, including locally hosted language models that never touch a corporate gateway, and captures their behaviour in context, correlating model requests, tool calls, file access, API requests, and shell commands with process and network detail so the reasoning chain behind an action is visible. Enforcement happens before execution and per action rather than per session, which means an agent granted a task cannot accumulate access as it works; each step is authorised against policy on its own terms. The result is a set of policy compliance records, audit trails, and alerts anchored at the point of execution. Buyers span security teams, IT leadership, and engineering leadership.