Knostic vs Zenity

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.

Zenity is a security and governance platform for AI agents: agents inside SaaS tools, agents built in-house on cloud AI platforms, and coding and personal agents on employee devices. It was co-founded by Ben Kliger (CEO) and Michael Bargury (CTO). It launched in April 2021 as a security platform for low-code/no-code development, added support for enterprise AI copilots in November 2023 and now focuses on agents. Research and development is in Tel Aviv, and go-to-market and operations are led from New York. Zenity says it has more than 230 employees. Its company page lists a $5 million seed round (November 2021), a $16.5 million Series A led by Intel Capital (September 2023), a strategic investment from Microsoft's M12 (July 2024), a $38 million Series B co-led by Third Point Ventures and DTCP (October 2024) and a $125 million Series C led by Norwest (August 2026). Zenity released a new version of its platform in August 2026, organized in three parts. Surface covers AI Observability (an inventory of agents, MCP servers, tools and data access, including agents built without security review), AISPM (configuration and permission checks before agents go live) and Exposure Management (which access paths are actually exploitable). Enforce covers Runtime Boundaries, which checks each agent action in real time and allows it, blocks it or shuts the agent down, including multi-step chains such as data exfiltration or privilege escalation; Agentic Identity, which gates actions on the identity an agent acts for in Okta or Microsoft Entra ID; and MCP Security, a gateway that allows, modifies or blocks tool calls and flags tool poisoning, rug pulls, shadow servers and over-scoped servers. Protect is AIDR, which detects direct and indirect prompt injection, data exfiltration, tool misuse and memory poisoning with LLM-based intent detection. Zenity names Microsoft 365 Copilot, Copilot Studio, Power Platform, ChatGPT Enterprise, Claude Enterprise, Salesforce Agentforce, ServiceNow, Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore, Google Vertex AI and Microsoft Foundry among the platforms it covers. For coding agents such as Cursor, Claude Code, Codex and GitHub Copilot, it collects activity through native agent hooks and OpenTelemetry and enforces policy through its MCP gateway. It sends agent findings to AWS Security Hub (in OCSF format) and to ServiceNow SecOps. **AI compliance coverage** Zenity maps its detections to the OWASP LLM Top 10 and MITRE ATLAS. We found no mapping on its site to the EU AI Act, the NIST AI RMF or ISO 42001. Its trust center says Zenity holds SOC 2 Type II and is ISO 27001 compliant and ISO 27701 compliant; reports are available on request. **Who it's for** Large enterprises running many agents across Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and OpenAI platforms, plus homegrown and coding agents, that want one policy layer over all of them. Zenity says most of its customers are Fortune 500 or Global 2000 companies; SoftBank Corp. is the only one named, in its Series C announcement. Gartner named Zenity a Cool Vendor in Agentic AI TRiSM (September 2025), and Zenity quotes an April 2026 Gartner report calling it the company to beat in AI agent governance.