Certiv, a Seattle, WA-based cybersecurity startup, has raised $4.2 million in a Pre-Seed funding round.
The round saw the backers Aviso Ventures, Founders Co-op, Fortson, and others.
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The company plans to use the funds to grow its engineering team and support early enterprise deployments.
Certiv installs on employee computers and runs AI agents on Windows, Mac, and Linux. From there, it monitors and controls what the agents do before anything reaches live systems. The platform helps organizations to:
- Find all agents, tools, models, and endpoints, and how they’re used
- See how agents work across the organization
- Control their behavior with clear, rule-based policies
- Keep systems safe by checking risk, applying policies, and stopping harmful actions in real time
Certiv is working with early customers to secure AI agents in development, operations, and knowledge work. The company is based in Seattle. Its platform helps businesses find, understand, control, and protect AI-driven work across employee devices.
Traditional security tools weren’t designed for autonomous software that can think, connect actions across systems and work at high speed. They may record what happens, but they can’t understand intent, assess risk in context, or enforce rules while actions are happening.
AI agents are already being used in companies to run code, read files, call APIs, and access sensitive systems with employee credentials. Tools like Claude Code, OpenClaw, GitHub Copilot Workspace, and OpenAI Codex are increasing what software can do on its own, but they also create new security risks and challenges.
“AI agents are one of the biggest technology shifts in decades,” said Andrew Peterson of Aviso Ventures. “Because they don’t always behave predictably, companies need new ways to control them. Certiv combines strong experience in AI, security, and infrastructure to protect these agents from the ground up, starting with employee computers.”
“Certiv works in front of agent activity, understands the reasons behind decisions, and controls what agents can do. It’s a new security layer built specifically for AI agents like OpenClaw and Claude Code.”
About Certiv
Founded in 2025 by Jason Needham, Paul Allen, and Dan Morris, Certiv provides a new Runtime Assurance Layer for AI agents. It helps employees and organizations automate work safely. The platform gives full visibility into what agents are doing and uses intent-based policies to guide their behavior and stop risky actions before any damage occurs.
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