Kontext Security Emerges With $4 Million for AI Agent Runtime Controls

Kontext Security today launched publicly with $4 million raised in a funding round led by 42CAP, with additional support from a16z CSX and HTGF.

Co-founded by Jens Ernstberger and Michel Osswald, the Munich, Germany-based startup has built a runtime security platform that provides organizations with visibility and control over AI agents’ actions.

Deployed between the AI agents and the systems and tools they access, Kontext’s runtime enforcement platform evaluates the agents in real time against security policies and risks.

Taking into account each agent’s identity, assigned task, target resource, and requested action, it shows organizations how the agents running in their environments behave and allows them to control what they do through enforced policies.

Organizations can initially run the platform to observe agent behavior, identify risks, and determine policy enforcement outcomes, and then enable enforcement to deny unauthorized actions.

The solution also provides a record of each agent’s behavior and of the decisions Kontext took, with context.

Kontext plans to expand its engineering team and invest in developing its runtime enforcement platform.

“An AI agent can be properly authenticated, use an approved tool, and still take an action no one authorized. As agents move from generating text to operating software, companies need a control point at the moment of action. Kontext connects identity with task context and policy to decide what an agent is allowed to do before it happens,” said Ernstberger, who serves as CEO.

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