Manifold Security

Manifold (Manifold Security, Inc.) builds an AI Detection & Response (AIDR) and governance platform for enterprises deploying autonomous AI agents. The company's premise is that endpoint detection and response tooling built for traditional malware and user behavior cannot observe what AI agents do at runtime — the tools they call, the MCP servers, databases, email systems, code repositories and production systems they connect to, and the commands they execute. Manifold aims to give security teams a real-time map of every agent in an environment, together with its connections and invoked resources and skills.

The platform is organized around three capability areas: discovery (runtime visibility into agents, the MCP servers and tools they call, and the resources and skills they invoke), risk and exposure (surfacing privilege paths, delegation chains and capability combinations that create exposure as agents accumulate access), and detection and response (real-time detection of agent threats from first suspicious action through the full attack chain, with the ability to remediate, quarantine or terminate). Manifold also offers Manifest, which provides MCP server supply chain intelligence and maps interactions between agent components and external systems. The company publishes security research on topics such as sandbox behavior in coding agent CLIs, guardrail drift in long conversations, and malicious extension campaigns.

Manifold's deployment model is agentless: it leverages existing infrastructure rather than requiring gateways or proxies, and company materials describe deployment in minutes to days. Internally, the team runs single-tenant deployments to keep customer environments isolated and uses an OpenTelemetry-native stack on Kubernetes with Terraform-based automation.

Founding story

Co-founders Neal Swaelens (CEO) and Oleksandr Yaremchuk (CTO) previously co-founded Laiyer AI, where they created the open-source LLM firewall LLM Guard. They met third co-founder Michael McKenna after Laiyer AI was acquired by Protect AI, which was later acquired by Palo Alto, and concluded that first-generation AI security had not scaled to agents that act rather than merely produce text.

Business model

Enterprise B2B software sold to organizations that deploy AI agents on employee and developer endpoints; the product is delivered as a platform with single-tenant deployments per customer and is accessed through a demo-led sales motion.

Traction

The company reports customer deployments run as isolated single-tenant environments and describes moving toward enterprise customers with a small team; it closed an $8 million seed round in March 2026 and publishes ongoing security research.

Latest developments

Following the March 2026 seed round, Manifold introduced MCP server supply chain intelligence in Manifest and published research in August 2026 on a Cursor CLI sandbox bypass, guardrail degradation during extended conversations, and 77 "evil twin" Open VSX extensions exfiltrating private repository and CI data.