Giskard vs Knostic

Giskard is a Paris-based company founded in 2021 by Alex Combessie, Jean-Marie John-Mathews and Andrei Avtomonov. Combessie and John-Mathews are now co-CEOs, and Giskard says its co-founders previously built AI systems at Dataiku and Thales. It sells software and services for testing and securing LLM agents. Its first funding round, €1.5 million led by Elaia with Bessemer Venture Partners, was announced in December 2022. Giskard says it also received a €3 million strategic investment through the European Commission's EIC Accelerator in 2023 and a €3 million Bpifrance grant in 2024 for LLM evaluation research with Mistral AI, Artefact, INA and BnF. CORDIS lists a €2.5 million EU contribution to its EIC project, which ran from September 2023 to August 2025. Giskard Hub is the paid platform. Continuous red teaming runs multi-turn attacks that adapt to the agent's answers, generated from the company's own documents and knowledge bases. It tests for hallucinations, stereotypes and discrimination, harmful content, disclosure of personal information and prompt injection. Testing is black-box: the agent only needs an API endpoint, and coverage is limited to text-to-text conversational agents. The Hub also schedules agent evaluations and manages test datasets, custom checks and human review, with alerts, SSO, role-based access and audit logs. It runs as SaaS, in a private cloud or on premises, with EU or US data processing. Giskard Guards, launched in April 2026, is a runtime guardrail layer that runs in the customer's infrastructure. It inspects prompts, responses, tool calls and multi-step reasoning, and its policies are written as code in OPA/Rego. Giskard also sells AI security audits that end in a go/no-go report, and it is offering a free trial of a new Agentic Red Teamer to a limited number of users. The open-source library is Apache 2.0 licensed. Version 3, a rewrite for multi-turn agent testing, became stable in August 2026. Version 2 is no longer actively maintained, and tabular models have no v3 equivalent. Giskard also publishes Phare, an LLM safety benchmark launched in February 2025 with Google DeepMind as research partner. Logos on its site include BNP Paribas, AXA, BPCE, Société Générale, Crédit Agricole, Michelin, Decathlon, L'Oréal and Doctolib. **AI compliance coverage** Guards includes an EU AI Act policy pack for prohibited practices such as social scoring and real-time biometric identification, and Giskard says Guards covers OWASP LLM risks. It doesn't map its products to the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust center, run on Bastion, lists GDPR and a SOC 2 Type 2 report and shows HIPAA as in progress. **Who it's for** Enterprises, especially in European banking and insurance, that run customer-facing LLM agents and want testing and runtime controls they can deploy on premises.

Knostic is an AI security company founded in 2023 by Gadi Evron (CEO) and Sounil Yu (CTO). It is based in Herndon, Virginia. It started out selling need-to-know access controls for enterprise AI assistants such as Microsoft 365 Copilot and Glean, which keep answers from exposing data a user shouldn't see. Its website now calls it "the control plane for agentic AI on the endpoint", and it sells two products for AI coding assistants and agents. Kirin runs alongside Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Codex, JetBrains, Devin Desktop and Gemini CLI, and supports Claude Cowork through a plugin. It checks each tool call against policy before it runs and blocks it, downgrades it or sends it to a human. It also validates MCP connections, scans dependencies for hallucinated, vulnerable or malicious packages, and finds and redacts secrets before they reach the model. It audits agent instruction files such as CLAUDE.md and .cursorrules. Kirin installs as a lightweight user-space client that admins can roll out with MDM scripts, on macOS and Windows; Linux is in beta. Its Shadow AI Discovery reports unsanctioned AI use but doesn't block it. AgentMesh scans agent skills, MCP servers and VS Code extensions and labels each one dangerous, risky or clean. In June 2026 VirusTotal added AgentMesh analysis of VS Code extensions. Knostic also publishes an open-source scanner, OpenAnt. Knostic still has a page that pairs it with Microsoft Purview against Copilot oversharing, and its AWS Marketplace listing is still the Copilot Readiness product. Its homepage, product and pricing pages no longer describe that product. It raised a $3.3 million pre-seed round in April 2024 and an $11 million round led by Bright Pixel Capital in March 2025. In 2025 it also received a $5 million investment as an RSAC Innovation Sandbox finalist. In June 2025 Virginia Business put its total funding at $19 million and its headcount at about 30. In October 2025 Gartner named Knostic a Cool Vendor in AI Cybersecurity Governance, for its controls on AI oversharing. **AI compliance coverage** Knostic doesn't map its products to the EU AI Act, the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust center lists a SOC 2 Type 2 report and GDPR, its FAQ offers a compliance package with the SOC 2 report and pen test results, and its Enterprise plan includes compliance reporting. **Who it's for** Security teams at companies whose developers use AI coding agents, agent skills and MCP servers. It is not a governance, model inventory or model testing platform.