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Startup Raises $4M to Police What AI Agents Actually Do at Runtime
Kontext, a security startup founded by Jens Ernstberger and Michel Osswald, raised $4 million led by 42CAP with a16z CSX and HTGF to build a runtime platform that evaluates AI agent actions against policy before they execute, addressing risks as agents get file, code and credential access in workplace systems.
What changes for operators — For a 10-200 person B2B company running agents that touch customer records, code repositories or internal tools, the risk isn't the agent's chat output — it's the action it takes once it has credentials. Kontext's pitch is a control point that sits between the agent and your systems, checking identity, requested action and task context before execution, with an observe-only mode to audit behavior first. It's a $4M seed-stage company, so treat it as an early signal rather than a vendor to deploy tomorrow: the category (runtime policy enforcement for agents) is one worth tracking as you scale agent access beyond pilot projects, especially before granting write access to production data or financial systems.