Cybersecurity startup Manifold today announced raising $8 million in a seed funding round led by Costanoa Ventures.
Cherry Ventures, Rain Capital, Modern Technical Fund, and several angel investors also participated in the investment round.
Founded in 2025, California-based Manifold has built an agentic AI Detection and Response (AIDR) platform that provides runtime visibility into agents’ activities.
Manifold provides security teams with real-time maps of the AI agents running in the organization’s environment, with information on the tools they call, the systems they access, and the actions they take.
The platform is deployed on existing infrastructure to uncover agents’ connections to MCP servers, databases, and external systems, and flag behavioral anomalies in real time.
By providing visibility into all AI agents and their acquired access, capabilities, and exposures, Manifold enables security teams to immediately quarantine, remediate, or terminate rogue agents.
The startup will use the fresh funding to fuel the development of its AIDR platform.
“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 Manifold CEO and co-founder Neal Swaelens.
“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,” Swaelens added.
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