Costanoa Ventures Leads Round to Secure AI Agents at Runtime, Defending Endpoints from Risk Associated with Rapid Agent Adoption
SAN DIEGO, March 18, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Manifold, the AI Detection and Response platform securing autonomous AI on endpoints, today announced the close of an $8 million seed funding round. Costanoa Ventures led the round with participation from Cherry Ventures, Rain Capital and Modern Technical Fund, and notable angel investors including former Uber CSO Joe Sullivan, and former Google DeepMind CISO Vijay Bolina. The funding will be used to fuel the development of Manifold’s agentic AI Detection and Response (AIDR) platform, designed to protect companies from the risks of expanding autonomous AI usage across enterprise endpoints, enabling enterprise employees to securely embrace agentic AI at scale.
The financing arrives during a period of exploding AI adoption. AI usage is already ubiquitous among developers — 85% currently rely on coding agents like Github Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor — and this trend is poised to expand to every knowledge worker with the rise of Claude Cowork, OpenClaw, and others. Engineers already represent a uniquely high-risk blind spot: their normal activity — reading entire codebases, executing shell commands, making API calls — already looks malicious to EDR tools, so they routinely get exceptions to standard endpoint policies. Coding agents now perform those same tasks autonomously, with broad access to production systems, source code, and CI/CD pipelines, and almost no effective controls or visibility into what they actually do. As agent adoption spreads across every job role, the attack surface grows, creating a critical organizational need for visibility into both what agents are deployed and what they actually do.
“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,” said Neal Swaelens, CEO and Co-Founder, Manifold. “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.”
Manifold founders Neal Swaelens, Oleksandr Yaremchuk, and Michael McKenna bring deep roots in foundational AI security; Swaelens and Yaremchuk co-founded Laiyer AI, where they created LLM Guard, the most widely adopted open-source LLM firewall in existence. They met McKenna following Laiyer AI’s acquisition by Protect AI (later acquired by Palo Alto) and together recognized a developing blind spot — first-generation AI security has not scaled for AI agents that act rather than merely talk.
The industry has responded to the rise of agentic AI by trying to scale guardrails, gateways, and classifiers built for chatbots, but these tools were designed to monitor text prompts and model outputs at the inference point and are blind to anything that happens beyond that perimeter. Worse, natural language classification is inherently limited, swamping security teams with false positives while missing the actual agentic activity that can do real damage.
Manifold provides full runtime visibility into what agents actually do — the tools they call, the systems they access and the actions they take. Security teams get a real-time map of every agent in their environment, their connections to MCP servers, databases, and external systems, with anomalies flagged the moment behavior drifts. For the first time, security teams can actually see what’s happening, define normal activity, and recognize risky behavior in real-time. Manifold is agentless and deploys in days, leveraging existing infrastructure — no new architecture, no gateways or proxies, no friction, no waiting.
“There’s an open window to define the category for agentic security now, but it won’t be open long,” said John Cowgill, Partner at Costanoa Ventures. “Endpoint agent security is the next major layer of enterprise infrastructure. This team already built foundational AI security tooling and deployed it at massive scale. They know precisely where the previous generation fails. We believe they will own what comes next.”
To learn more about Manifold visit www.manifold.security.
About Manifold
Manifold is the AI Detection & Response (AIDR) and Governance platform built for the agentic enterprise. Manifold secures endpoints, monitors agent behavior at runtime, detects threats in real-time, and gives security teams the visibility and context to investigate and respond.
About Costanoa
Costanoa exists to elevate founders building companies of consequence. We lead investments from formation through Series A in Applied AI, AI Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, National Security, and Fintech. With $2.5B AUM, we’re boutique by design—making fewer investments to deliver deeper expertise and operational support when it matters most: the early, defining stages of growth. We have been recognized as one of America’s Top Venture Capital Firms by TIME and named to a top 4 Seed-Stage firm on Inc.’s Founder-Friendly Investors list. For more information, please visit www.costanoa.vc.
Media Contact:
Will Clark
Marketbridge for Manifold
manifold@marketbridge.com
