Knostic

Knostic is an AI security company that provides need-to-know-based access controls for large language models and enterprise AI, preventing the oversharing of sensitive information by AI assistants and agents. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Herndon, Virginia, the company addresses a distinctive risk: enterprise search tools and copilots such as Microsoft 365 Copilot and Glean can surface data to users who technically have file access but should not see it in context, leading to inadvertent leaks of confidential information. Knostic enforces knowledge-level controls so AI systems answer according to each user's role and permissions, aligning LLM responses with an organization's need-to-know boundaries. The platform has expanded to cover the broader agentic and AI-assisted development ecosystem, adding agent discovery and monitoring, threat detection for AI coding tools, supply-chain security for MCP servers and IDE extensions, LLM-powered code analysis, shadow AI detection, and secrets protection. Knostic targets CISOs, security teams, and governance functions adopting enterprise AI. Backed by roughly $14.3M in funding from investors including Bright Pixel Capital, DNX Ventures, Seedcamp, and Silicon Valley CISO Investments, Knostic's distinguishing focus is data oversharing and knowledge-boundary enforcement for generative AI rather than model-level adversarial testing.