Manifold, the AI Detection and Response platform securing autonomous AI on endpoints, today announced the close of an $8 million seed funding round. Costanoa Ventures led the round with participation from Cherry Ventures, Rain Capital and Modern Technical Fund, and notable angel investors including former Uber CSO Joe Sullivan, and former Google DeepMind CISO Vijay Bolina. The funding will be used to fuel the development of Manifold’s agentic AI Detection and Response (AIDR) platform, designed to protect companies from the risks of expanding autonomous AI usage across enterprise endpoints, enabling enterprise employees to securely embrace agentic AI at scale.The financing arrives during a period of exploding AI adoption. AI usage is already ubiquitous among developers — 85% currently rely on coding agents like Github Copilot, Claude Code, and Cursor — and this trend is poised to expand to every knowledge worker with the rise of Claude Cowork, OpenClaw, and others. Engineers already represent a uniquely high-risk blind spot: their normal activity — reading entire codebases, executing shell commands, making API calls — already looks malicious to EDR tools, so they routinely get exceptions to standard endpoint policies. Coding agents now perform those same tasks autonomously, with broad access to production systems, source code, and CI/CD pipelines, and almost no effective controls or visibility into what they actually do. As agent adoption spreads across every job role, the attack surface grows, creating a critical organizational need for visibility into both what agents are deployed and what they actually do.“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 Neal Swaelens, CEO and Co-Founder, Manifold. "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.”NoYesFundraising News19 Mar, 2026