Comp AI sets eyes on a continuously agentic future for security and compliance

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1:13That's Framer.com slash tcstartups. Rules and restrictions may apply. Comp.ai is a cybersecurity and compliance startup, and the company announced that it has raised a$34 million Series A round. The round was led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures. The company was founded last January by Lewis Carhart, who is the CEO, Claudio Fuentes, who is the COO, and his brother Mariano Fuentes, who is the CTO. Claudio and Mariano had been building startups together for nearly a decade, met Carhart a few years ago, and invited him to join Leap AI, a workflow platform they were building. Claudio was the CEO and co-founder, while Carhart served as head of growth, and Mariano was a senior full-stack engineer.

2:03The startup ran for about two years, growing to more than a million users, but they eventually decided to shut it down after not finding a sticky enough use case to warrant continued investment. That experience taught them a lot, though. For one, they learned how to build with LLMs and the importance of finding a specific use case for a product. They also learned how tedious the SOC 2 compliance process was, especially as they tried to scale the platform to work with bigger enterprise clients. Claudio said, It's a very obscure process. It took us a couple of months of doing things by hand, and the whole time, it meant taking our eyes off building the product.

2:45Alas, a startup idea was born. This time, Carhartt would take the lead as CEO because it was his idea. Comp.ai says it's building an agentic platform to tackle tedious security and compliance work. That means having AI agents help write company security policies or collect evidence for security audits. The platform also continuously monitors whether a company is meeting compliance controls. Comp.ai is part of the next-gen of cybersecurity startups emerging to help companies run more efficiently in the agentic era. Carhartt told TechCrunch, for a lot of software companies, security and compliance are directly tied to revenue.

3:30What Comp.A.I. automates is much of the work companies traditionally have to do around that process. The software helps companies meet and maintain those security requirements, but does not replace actual independent audit review. It also doesn't replace humans, the trio said. Human workers help onboard the AI, support the controls, and maintain the agentic workflow. Carhartt said, an agent might draft a policy, for example, but a person still reviews and approves it. As agents take on more consequential actions over time, we believe the level of safeguards and human approval should increase accordingly.

4:11The company also offers AI-powered penetration testing, where the platform proactively tests code bases and infrastructure for vulnerabilities. The team hopes this Series A capital will help with product expansion. It has raised$37.5 million in funding to date. There has been much conversation about the new wave of security risks in the agentic era, and with it, a wave of AI security and compliance companies like Vanta and Drada. Carhartt said what the rapid adoption and experimentation companies are doing with AI is creating a need for continuous and perhaps autonomous security and compliance platforms.

4:54He said, imagine a company completes its SOC 2 audit and two weeks later deploys a new AI agent that can access customer data, change permissions across an internal system, or introduce a new vulnerability through code deployment. The audit did not become invalid. It simply wasn't designed to tell you in real time what changed afterward. As companies adopt more AI, Mariano said they also need to show what an agent accessed, what it tried to do, and whether it stayed within the boundaries given. Comp AI is tackling this by starting with permissions and accountability. We're building toward a security layer, he said, that can monitor and validate those kinds of risk more continuously as these systems evolve.

5:42That's all for now. For the latest in tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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