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Certiv Emerges from Stealth to Launch the First Runtime Assurance Layer for AI Agents

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Certiv helps enterprises adopt AI agents safely by governing and securing agent decisions and actions on employee endpoints.

SEATTLE, March 16, 2026-- Certiv today emerged from stealth with $4.2 million in pre-seed funding from Aviso Ventures, Founders Co-op, Fortson, and other strategic investors, introducing a new security category: Runtime Assurance for AI Agents. The platform helps enterprises discover, understand, control, and protect agentic work across employee endpoints. Funding will support engineering growth and early enterprise deployments.

"AI agents represent one of the most important technology shifts in decades," said Andrew Peterson of Aviso Ventures. "Because they are non-deterministic, enterprises need new controls to govern these autonomous systems. Certiv brings deep expertise across AI, security, and infrastructure to secure agents from the ground up, starting with the employee workstation."

AI agents are already operating inside enterprises executing code, reading files, calling APIs, and interacting with sensitive systems using employee credentials. Tools such as Claude Code, OpenClaw, GitHub Copilot Workspace, and OpenAI Codex are expanding what software can do autonomously, but they also introduce a new attack surface and major operational risk.

Traditional security tools were not built for autonomous software that reasons, chains actions across systems, and executes tasks at machine speed. They may capture logs after the fact, but cannot understand agent intent, evaluate risk in context, or enforce policy during execution.

Certiv installs on employee workstations running AI agents across Windows, Mac, and Linux. From that control point, it intercepts, observes, and governs agent actions at the source before they reach production systems. The platform enables organizations to:

• Discover every agent, tool, model, endpoint, and usage pattern
• Understand how agents operate across the organization
• Control behavior with deterministic and intent-based policies
• Protect systems by scoring risk, evaluating policy, and stopping dangerous actions in real time

"Traditional security tools were built for human-driven software," said Jason Needham, CEO and co-founder of Certiv. "Certiv sits in front of agent execution, understands why decisions are made, and governs what agents are allowed to do. It is a new security layer purpose-built for AI agents like OpenClaw and Claude Code."

Certiv is working with early customers to secure agents across development, operations, and knowledge workflows. The company is headquartered in Seattle.

Learn more at certiv.ai

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