On-premises registry and runtime guard for AI models, agents, and MCP servers

Jozu's premise is that AI artifacts should move through an enterprise the way containers do, with a registry, a signature, and a provenance record, rather than being pulled straight from a public hub into production. The company's open-source project, KitOps, packages a model together with its datasets, code, and configuration into a ModelKit, a reproducible OCI artifact, and is the most widely adopted implementation of the ModelPack specification. Jozu Hub is the commercial control plane around that: deployed to the customer's own Kubernetes, it scans incoming models, agents, and MCP servers across nine vulnerability classes, applies central policy, and produces signed artifacts with attestations and tamper-evident logs.

Agent Guard covers the other half of the lifecycle, enforcement while something is running. It isolates each agent in a microVM, inspects prompts for injection and other malicious input, redacts sensitive data before it leaves, and constrains which tools an agent may call, applying policy locally so it holds even when the host has no network path back to a management plane. That design is aimed at government, defense, and regulated buyers operating disconnected or air-gapped environments. Jozu was founded in 2023 in New York by Brad Micklea, previously co-founder of Codenvy, which Red Hat acquired, and general manager of Amazon API Gateway, and raised a $4M seed round led by HalfCourt Capital with Mozilla Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, and AlleyCorp participating.