AI Governance & Security Vendor Wiki

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Knostic

Primary category: entitlement-aware-rag. Also: enterprise-ai-assistant.

One-liner — A “need-to-know” access-control and oversharing-detection layer that sits above document ACLs to stop enterprise AI assistants (Microsoft 365 Copilot, Glean, Gemini) from surfacing answers a user can technically reach but has no business seeing.

What it does

Enterprise AI assistants answer questions by retrieving and synthesizing from everything the asking user is permitted to open. In most M365 tenants those permissions are far looser than anyone realizes — years of over-shared SharePoint sites, inherited folder access, “share with everyone” links. A human rarely stumbles across the over-permissioned HR spreadsheet; Copilot will read it, infer from it, and hand the answer to anyone who asks (“what’s the VP of Sales’ bonus?”, “what M&A targets are we looking at?”). Knostic’s founders frame it as: LLMs can’t keep a secret.

Knostic adds a knowledge-level / need-to-know policy layer on top of raw ACLs. It works in three moves:

  1. Discover/simulate — it probes the assistant the way an employee would (simulated queries) to surface oversharing exposure paths before they become incidents.
  2. Policy — enforces need-to-know boundaries keyed to a user’s role, independent of the underlying permission system (“if you need to know, you know; if you don’t, you don’t”).
  3. Remediate/audit — pinpoints the precise permission or label issues to fix and produces an audit trail of who could see what and why.

Its central argument: mirroring document ACLs is not enough, because the ACLs themselves are too loose. Need-to-know is a separate, higher policy layer than file permissions.

Where it sits in the stack

Primary category entitlement-aware-rag (retrieval layer); also relevant to enterprise-ai-assistant governance. Its risk role is controlling access to sensitive data — it does not screen untrusted input or control outbound flows; it narrows what private knowledge the model is allowed to surface to a given user. Trust zone: the green/yellow boundary inside the enterprise, governing internal knowledge exposure rather than external exfiltration.

Deployment & architecture

  • SaaS, integrated read-only/advisory. It analyzes oversharing exposure and hands findings to the enforcement plane rather than enforcing inline — e.g. “Purview Manages Data Access, Knostic Manages AI Exposure,” delivering “Copilot risk insights in days, not months, pinpointing precise permission or labeling issues for Purview to act on.”
  • Detection is AI-native (simulating inference/reconstruction risk) rather than simple content scanning, because “LLMs don’t just retrieve data — they infer and reconstruct hidden insights.”
  • Integrations: Microsoft 365 Copilot, glean, Google Gemini; Microsoft Purview for remediation. Also markets shadow-AI discovery, prompt-injection and MCP-server risk checks.
  • To verify: exact API surface (Graph scope, whether it reads production traffic vs only simulates), and whether any runtime/inline enforcement exists vs advisory-only. Vendor pages do not specify.

Positioning & differentiators

Knostic’s wedge is the gap between ACL-mirroring and need-to-know. Contrast the neighbors:

  • microsoft-graph / native Copilot — enforces the raw SharePoint/Graph ACLs. Knostic’s whole pitch is that those ACLs are themselves over-permissioned, so faithful ACL enforcement still overshares.
  • glean — permission-mirroring enterprise search; same critique: mirroring loose permissions faithfully still leaks.
  • microsoft-purview — labels and DLP on the data plane; Knostic positions as complementary, feeding Purview the AI-specific exposure findings it can’t see on its own.

Differentiator claims (vendor marketing): “world’s first need-to-know access controls for LLMs”; the discover-by-simulation approach; recognition sweep (RSA Launch Pad 2024 + Black Hat Startup Spotlight 2024 winner; RSAC 2025 Innovation Sandbox Top-10 finalist).

Ownership, funding & M&A

  • Independent, VC-backed (high confidence). No acquisition flagged in the seed and none found.
  • Founded 2023 by Gadi Evron (CEO; serial security entrepreneur, ex-Citibank/PwC) and Sounil Yu (CTO; creator of the Cyber Defense Matrix, ex-Bank of America Chief Security Scientist).
  • HQ Herndon, Virginia, with R&D in Tel Aviv, Israel. (Seed/brief guess of “New York” not confirmed — primary release lists Herndon, VA.)
  • Funding (~$19.3M total): $3.3M pre-seed (Apr 2024, Shield Capital / Pitango First / DNX / Seedcamp + angels); $11M Series A (Mar 5 2025, led by Bright Pixel Capital, with SVCI, DNX, Seedcamp, angels Kevin Mahaffey and Gerhard Eschelbeck); $5M RSAC 2025 Innovation Sandbox Top-10 finalist investment (Apr 2025). Note the Series A release stated ~$14.3M cumulative before the RSAC $5M.

CTO / hedge-fund lens

Day-1 if you are deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot (or Glean) on a tenant with legacy SharePoint sprawl — which describes most funds. The oversharing risk is concrete and embarrassing for an asset manager: comp, P&L, deal pipeline, LP data, and MNPI can all be synthesized out of over-shared documents by a tool every employee suddenly has. Knostic targets exactly the “we turned on Copilot and now anyone can ask about bonuses” failure mode.

Caveats for a smaller shop: it is an added control on top of Copilot + Purview, advisory rather than an inline guardrail, so value depends on having someone to action its findings. A 50-person fund that hasn’t deployed Copilot tenant-wide may get most of the benefit from a Purview/SharePoint permissions cleanup first; Knostic earns its keep once Copilot/Glean is live at scale and you need continuous oversharing assurance. Limited direct SR 11-7 / model-risk angle — this is data-exposure governance, not model validation, though it supports the broader AI-use audit story.

Competitors / alternatives

Open questions / to verify

  • Exact deployment surface: Graph API scopes, read-only vs any inline enforcement, production-traffic monitoring vs simulation-only.
  • Whether the $5M RSAC finalist money is structured as investment vs award, and confirmed cumulative total (~$19.3M is summed across rounds).
  • Customer references / named deployments in financial services.

Sources

History

  • [2026-06-28] Stub created from seed registry.
  • [2026-06-28] Researched; confirmed independent (high), founded 2023 by Gadi Evron + Sounil Yu, HQ Herndon VA + Tel Aviv (not NY), ~$19.3M funding ($3.3M pre-seed Apr 2024 / $11M Series A Mar 2025 / $5M RSAC finalist Apr 2025), advisory need-to-know layer for Copilot/Glean oversharing. No M&A. 5 sources cached. status→researched.

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