Knostic vs WitnessAI

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.

WitnessAI is an AI security and governance platform for enterprise AI use by employees and by AI agents. It was founded in 2023 and incubated by Ballistic Ventures. CEO Rick Caccia, previously SVP of marketing at Palo Alto Networks, is the only co-founder the company names. It is based in Mountain View, California, and has raised about $85.5 million in two announced rounds: $27.5 million co-led by GV and Ballistic Ventures (May 2024) and $58 million in strategic funding led by Sound Ventures (January 2026), with Fin Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Forgepoint Capital Partners taking part. The platform has three modules. Observe finds the AI apps, agents and MCP servers in use, drawing on a catalog of thousands of AI applications, and classifies conversations by intent. Control sets policies by department, role, intent or workforce type, routes prompts to approved or cheaper models, limits agents to approved MCP servers and tools, redacts sensitive data in real time and keeps audit trails. Protect (Witness Protect, which WitnessAI calls "the enterprise AI firewall") screens prompts and responses for prompt injection, jailbreaks and harmful output and tokenizes PII, credentials and secrets. Witness Attack runs automated red teaming against models before deployment. WitnessAI says it sees AI activity across the network without browser extensions or endpoint clients, including native apps such as Windows 11 Copilot and Office 365, and it integrates with F5 BIG-IP SSL Orchestrator for encrypted AI traffic. Each customer gets a single-tenant instance with customer-controlled encryption. In January 2026 it launched WitnessAI Agentic Security, which covers coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor and Codex and records the user, agent, tool and rule for every blocked tool call. In July 2026 it added AI FinOps features: spend estimates for unsanctioned AI apps and agents, metering of sanctioned token use, an ROI dashboard and cost-based model routing. **AI compliance coverage** The compliance page offers logging of every AI app and interaction, policy enforcement and masking of regulated data, but names no AI framework. WitnessAI's AWS Marketplace listing says its audit trails support compliance reporting for the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, the NIST AI RMF and PCI DSS 4.0.1. We found no control mappings for any of them. WitnessAI announced a SOC 2 Type II attestation in October 2025; it has no public trust center. **Who it's for** Large enterprises that want to see and govern how employees and agents use public and internal AI tools, and to add runtime protection to their own AI apps. WitnessAI says its customers include financial services firms, utilities, airlines, automakers, retailers and telecoms. InComm Payments is the only customer it names on its site.