CISO Tribune

Vendor comparison · 2 companies

Fiddler AI vs HiddenLayer

Fiddler AI sells the AI Control Plane, a platform for first-party and third-party agents from the creation layer to production. HiddenLayer sells AI security that analyzes AI applications, models, and assets, identifies their risks, and protects them as teams build. CISO Tribune files both under AI model and agent security and AI firewalls and guardrails. This page sets the two records side by side: what each sells, where it is based, who owns and funds it, the customers it names and its recent news, each fact numbered to its source.

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  • Fiddler AI
  • HiddenLayer
Fiddler AI vs HiddenLayer: Products, Customers and Funding Compared
Fiddler AIFiddler AI sells the AI Control Plane, a platform for first-party and third-party agents from the creation layer to production.fiddler.aiHiddenLayerHiddenLayer sells AI security that analyzes AI applications, models, and assets, identifies their risks, and protects them as teams build.hiddenlayer.com
What it sells
  • Agentic Observability[2][4]Monitors every layer of the agentic hierarchy, from application health to agent interactions to individual spans.
  • ML Observability[2][5]Detects data and concept drift in predictive models and provides root cause analysis and fairness metrics.
  • Fiddler Centor Models[2][3][6]Power guardrails and evaluations in-environment, with no external LLM API calls.
  • Agent Registry[7]Lists every agent application in Fiddler, including first-party, third-party and coding agents.
  • Model Scanning[1][4][6]Scans third-party and proprietary machine learning models to detect hidden risks.
  • Red Teaming[1][6][10]Runs continuous testing intended to identify threats early and validate AI defenses.
  • AI Guardrails[1][11]Applies policy-based controls intended to prevent misuse, data leakage and adversarial attacks on AI systems.
  • Agentic and MCP Protection[1][4][5][6]Monitors autonomous AI agents and MCP connections and is intended to guard against rogue behavior.
Categories
Headquarters
Not stated on its pagesAustin, United States[2]
Founded
2018[1]2022[2]
Ownership and funding
Privately held[12]Privately held[3]
Named customers
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Recent news
  • January 27, 2026Fiddler AI announced a $30 million Series C funding round led by RPS Ventures.[1]
  • August 12, 2026HiddenLayer announced the appointment of Mike Gesnaldo as Chief Revenue Officer.[14]
G2 and Gartner Peer Insights
  • G2: listed, seen November 10, 2026[12]
  • Gartner Peer Insights: Not stated on its pages
  • G2: Not stated on its pages
  • Gartner Peer Insights: Not stated on its pages
Who it fits
From its own pages, Fiddler AI sells mainly to organizations deploying AI agents and predictive models, across all industries and in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, insurance and government. The typical users are software and AI engineers, data scientists, platform and DevOps teams, and security and compliance teams. Its pages address insurers, healthcare organizations and financial institutions deploying AI across underwriting, fraud and trading. Deployment options on the Enterprise plan are SaaS, VPC or on-premises.HiddenLayer describes securing AI used for fraud detection, trading, compliance, and customer engagement. HiddenLayer offers protection of agentic, generative, and predictive AI systems for mission assurance. HiddenLayer describes deployment through APIs, gateways, SDKs, or lightweight on-device integrations.
Last verified
November 6, 2026November 2, 2026

Where they overlap

  • AI model and agent security is the primary category of both Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer; both are also filed under AI firewalls and guardrails.
  • Both are privately held.

Where they differ, field by field

  • Fiddler AI is also filed under AI governance.
  • Fiddler AI lists Agentic Observability, ML Observability, Fiddler Centor Models and Agent Registry. HiddenLayer lists Model Scanning, Red Teaming, AI Guardrails and Agentic and MCP Protection.
  • HiddenLayer is headquartered in Austin, United States.
  • Fiddler AI was founded in 2018. HiddenLayer was founded in 2022.

How they differ

CISO Tribune files Fiddler AI under AI model and agent security, AI governance, and AI firewalls and guardrails, with AI model and agent security as its primary category. CISO Tribune files HiddenLayer under AI model and agent security and AI firewalls and guardrails, with AI model and agent security as its primary category. Both companies are privately held, and Fiddler AI was founded in 2018 while HiddenLayer was founded in 2022. HiddenLayer is headquartered in Austin, United States.

Fiddler AI sells Agentic Observability, ML Observability, Fiddler Centor Models and Agent Registry, and it describes an AI Control Plane for first-party and third-party agents. Its Agent Registry lists agent applications, and Fiddler records evaluation and policy outcomes and generates audit evidence aligned with frameworks such as NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act. HiddenLayer sells Model Scanning, Red Teaming, AI Guardrails, and Agentic and MCP Protection. HiddenLayer also builds an inventory of the AI applications, models, and assets in a customer environment. The two overlap on guardrails and on monitoring of agents, while Fiddler AI adds predictive model observability with drift and fairness metrics, and HiddenLayer adds model scanning and red teaming.

Fiddler AI states that Fortune 100 organizations use it, and its pages address insurers, healthcare organizations and financial institutions. HiddenLayer describes securing AI used for fraud detection, trading, compliance, and customer engagement. Fiddler AI is offered in SaaS, VPC and AWS GovCloud, while HiddenLayer offers deployment through APIs, gateways, SDKs, or lightweight on-device integrations. On January 27, 2026, Fiddler AI announced a $30 million Series C funding round led by RPS Ventures. On August 12, 2026, HiddenLayer announced the appointment of a Chief Revenue Officer.

What it sells: Fiddler AI

What Agentic Observability does[2][4]
Fiddler Agentic Observability monitors every layer of the agentic hierarchy from application health to agent interactions to individual spans. Fiddler gives aggregated and granular visibility from application to session to agent to trace to span.
What ML Observability does[2][5]
Fiddler ML Observability provides root cause analysis and fairness metrics such as disparate impact, demographic parity and equal opportunity. Fiddler tracks performance, drift, data integrity and model bias to observe and improve model health.
What Fiddler Centor Models does[2][3][6]
Fiddler Centor Models power guardrails and evaluations in-environment, with no external LLM API calls. Customers can choose Fiddler Centor Models that run in their environment, custom evaluators for domain-specific logic, or external judges for advanced reasoning.
What Agent Registry does[7]
Agent Registry lists every agent application in Fiddler, including first-party, third-party and coding agents. Fiddler records evaluation and policy outcomes with full traceability and generates audit evidence aligned with frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, NAIC, SR 11-7, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 and the EU AI Act.

Questions about Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer

What do Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer sell?
Fiddler AI sells Agentic Observability, ML Observability, Fiddler Centor Models and Agent Registry. HiddenLayer sells Model Scanning, Red Teaming, AI Guardrails and Agentic and MCP Protection.
Are Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer in the same category?
Yes. AI model and agent security is the primary category of both on CISO Tribune.
Where are Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer headquartered?
HiddenLayer is headquartered in Austin, United States.
When were Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer founded?
Fiddler AI was founded in 2018. HiddenLayer was founded in 2022.
Who owns Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer?
Fiddler AI is privately held. HiddenLayer is privately held.
Who are Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer sold to?
From its own pages, Fiddler AI sells mainly to organizations deploying AI agents and predictive models, across all industries and in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, insurance and government. HiddenLayer describes securing AI used for fraud detection, trading, compliance, and customer engagement.
What have Fiddler AI and HiddenLayer announced recently?
January 27, 2026: Fiddler AI announced a $30 million Series C funding round led by RPS Ventures. August 12, 2026: HiddenLayer announced the appointment of Mike Gesnaldo as Chief Revenue Officer.

About Fiddler AI

Fiddler AI sells the AI Control Plane, a platform for first-party and third-party agents from the creation layer to production. Fiddler combines continuous evaluation, monitoring, enforceable policy and auditable governance for enterprises. Fiddler Centor Models power guardrails and evaluations in-environment, with no external LLM API calls.[2][3]

Fiddler Agentic Observability monitors every layer of the agentic hierarchy from application health to agent interactions to individual spans. Fiddler ML Observability provides root cause analysis and fairness metrics such as disparate impact, demographic parity and equal opportunity. Fiddler Guardrails enforce policy inline, at the agent's request and response path, in under 80ms. Fiddler detects and redacts PII, PHI and secrets on the same request, before a prompt reaches the model and before a response reaches the developer. The Free plan includes real-time guardrails powered by Fiddler Centor Models at under 80ms latency, protecting against hallucinations, toxicity, PII/PHI, prompt injection and jailbreak attempts. Fiddler tracks 100+ out-of-the-box and custom metrics including hallucination, toxicity, PII/PHI leakage and jailbreak attempts.[2][3][4][5][6]

Fiddler AI provides centralized governance and oversight for agents and predictive models across the enterprise, with a registry of your agents, enforced guardrails and the audit evidence needed to meet evolving regulatory requirements. Agent Registry lists every agent application in Fiddler, including first-party, third-party and coding agents. Fiddler records evaluation and policy outcomes with full traceability and generates audit evidence aligned with frameworks and regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, NAIC, SR 11-7, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001 and the EU AI Act. Guardrails run in your own environment, so prompts and responses never leave your infrastructure. Teams can monitor predictive models and agents for drift, bias and performance degradation, run deep diagnostics to find root causes, and create custom reports for MRM and compliance reviews. Fiddler extends governance to the creation layer, monitoring the IDE, CLI and MCP boundary to validate tool invocations against allowlists, scan for secrets, and prevent coding agents from committing insecure code or accessing unauthorized repositories.[5][7]

Fiddler is offered in SaaS, VPC and AWS GovCloud. Fiddler can be deployed in any secure cloud environment or air-gapped. Fiddler states it is SOC 2 Type II compliant, with role-based access control and SSO. Fiddler states it is HIPAA ready. Fiddler AI Observability can run within Amazon SageMaker Studio. Fiddler is model- and cloud-agnostic, working across Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, LangGraph and 100+ other providers. The Developer plan is usage-based at $0.002 per trace and adds unified observability for agentic and predictive systems, custom evaluators and SSO. The Enterprise plan adds flexible deployment of SaaS, VPC or on-premises, along with white-glove support with a named Customer Success Manager and customized onboarding.[3][5][8]

Fiddler AI is used by organizations deploying agents across all industries, as well as highly regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, insurance and government. The typical users are software and AI engineers, data scientists, platform and DevOps teams, and security and compliance teams. Fiddler positions its AI Observability and Security platform as the Unified AI Command Center for insurers. Fiddler provides a unified AI observability and security platform for healthcare organizations. Fiddler describes itself as the control plane for AI agents in financial services, covering monitoring, policy and governance. Financial institutions deploying AI across underwriting, fraud and trading rely on Fiddler for unified observability, policy enforcement and regulatory-ready audit trails. Fiddler monitors Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision models to track and get real-time alerts on anomalies and data drift. Fiddler explains predictions in ML models powering autonomous vehicles, such as aerial drones and unmanned underwater vehicles. Fortune 100 organizations use Fiddler for agentic and predictive applications. For customer-facing agents, Fiddler governs agents built in-house or integrated from third-party providers in a unified dashboard with audit evidence for GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA and NAIC compliance.[2][3][4][5][6][8][9][10]

Fiddler's founders began with explainability and then expanded to observability to track how models change over time. Fiddler describes itself today as the Control Plane for AI Agents. IQT first invested in Fiddler in 2019.[2][4][6][8][10][11]

Fiddler AI on the record

Sources

Fiddler AI full record

  1. [1]Fiddler Raises $30M Series C to Deliver the First Control Plane for AIFiddler AI · published January 27, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]fiddler.aiFiddler AI · fiddler.ai · undated page, accessed November 6, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]Fiddler AI: The Control Plane for Enterprise AI AgentsFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Fiddler AI Observability for Healthcare LLM ApplicationsFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]Fiddler AI Control Plane for Financial Services | Fiddler AIFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Customer Experience AI Observability for Agents | Fiddler AIFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]AI Governance, Risk Management, and Compliance (GRC) | Fiddler AIFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Fiddler AI Observability for Insurance LLM Applications | Fiddler AIFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]AI Observability for Lending and Trading | Fiddler AIFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]Government | Fiddler AIFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]About Us | Fiddler AIFiddler AI · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Fiddler AI Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & FeaturesG2 · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier C

HiddenLayer full record

  1. [1]HiddenLayer | Total AI SecurityHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]Hiddenlayer launches the first security solution to protect ai powered products 301587864HiddenLayer via PR Newswire · prnewswire.com · published July 19, 2022 · Tier A
  3. [3]Hiddenlayer 100m series b ai securityHiddenLayer · hiddenlayer.com · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Application Developers | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]AI Runtime Security | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]Platform | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]AI Discovery | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]AI Supply Chain Security | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]AI Attack Simulation | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]CISO | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]AI Guardrails | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Services | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Financial Services | HiddenLayerHiddenLayer · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]HiddenLayer Appoints Mike Gesnaldo as Chief Revenue OfficerHiddenLayer · published August 12, 2026 · Tier A

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