CISO Tribune

Vendor comparison · 2 companies

Fiddler AI vs Knostic

Fiddler AI sells the AI Control Plane, a platform for first-party and third-party agents from the creation layer to production. Knostic discovers and secures agents, coding assistants, and their supply chain, from MCP to skills and Code to Cowork. CISO Tribune files both under AI model and agent security and AI governance. 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
  • Knostic
Fiddler AI vs Knostic: 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.aiKnosticKnostic discovers and secures agents, coding assistants, and their supply chain, from MCP to skills and Code to Cowork.knostic.ai
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.
  • Kirin[4][5][6][7][11]Runs on the endpoint inside supported agents. Denies or blocks unsafe agent actions.
  • AgentMesh[4][5][6][7][11]Rates every skill, server, and extension.
Categories
Headquarters
Not stated on its pagesReston, United States[3]
Founded
2018[1]2023[2][7]
Ownership and funding
Privately held[12]Privately held[5]
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]
  • June 12, 2026Knostic was recognized in the Cloud Security Alliance's first Agentic AI Security Innovator Market Map.[10]
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.From its own pages, the company sells mainly to developers and teams that use AI coding agents and IDEs, with plans written for individual developers, growing teams, and engineering managers. Its pages describe developers and business users who install agents, extensions, MCP servers, and skills from open ecosystems. It lists an inventory export described as a register of AI systems for compliance and risk reporting. Its stated support covers macOS and Windows.
Last verified
November 6, 2026September 27, 2026

Where they overlap

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

Where they differ, field by field

  • Fiddler AI is also filed under AI firewalls and guardrails.
  • Fiddler AI lists Agentic Observability, ML Observability, Fiddler Centor Models and Agent Registry. Knostic lists Kirin and AgentMesh.
  • Knostic is headquartered in Reston, United States.
  • Fiddler AI was founded in 2018. Knostic was founded in 2023.

How they differ

CISO Tribune files both Fiddler AI and Knostic under AI model and agent security as the primary category, with AI governance as a further category for each. Fiddler AI sells Agentic Observability, ML Observability, Fiddler Centor Models and an Agent Registry, and describes an AI Control Plane for first-party and third-party agents. Knostic sells Kirin, which runs on the endpoint inside supported agents and denies or blocks unsafe agent actions, and AgentMesh, which rates every skill, server, and extension. Both describe a central point for governing agents, though Fiddler AI also covers predictive models with drift and fairness metrics.

Fiddler AI was founded in 2018 and is privately held, and on January 27, 2026 it announced a $30 million Series C funding round led by RPS Ventures. Knostic is headquartered in Reston, United States, was founded in 2023, and is privately held. On June 12, 2026, Knostic was recognized in the Cloud Security Alliance's first Agentic AI Security Innovator Market Map.

Fiddler AI says it is used by organizations deploying agents across all industries, including financial services, healthcare, insurance and government, and that Fortune 100 organizations use it. Fiddler offers SaaS, VPC and AWS GovCloud, and its Enterprise plan adds on-premises deployment. Knostic sells mainly to developers and teams that use AI coding agents and IDEs. Kirin supports Claude Code CLI, Cursor, Windsurf, and VS Code + GitHub Copilot, on macOS and Windows.

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.

What it sells: Knostic

What Kirin does[4][5][6][7][11]
Kirin runs on the endpoint inside supported agents and sees the tools, extensions, servers, and skills actually installed and used. Kirin denies a destructive command before it executes, tells the developer why, and logs a Prevented alert for the SOC. Kirin blocks the connection to an MCP server before it is established, after AgentMesh scans and rates the server. Kirin deploys as an extension for Cursor and VS Code.
What AgentMesh does[4][5][6][7][11]
AgentMesh rates every skill, server, and extension. AgentMesh scans MCP servers for prompt injection, malicious behaviour, and supply-chain risk. AgentMesh detects prompt injection in skills, MCP servers, and extensions before install. Every paid AgentMesh plan includes Kirin IDE security.

Questions about Fiddler AI and Knostic

What do Fiddler AI and Knostic sell?
Fiddler AI sells Agentic Observability, ML Observability, Fiddler Centor Models and Agent Registry. Knostic sells Kirin and AgentMesh.
Are Fiddler AI and Knostic in the same category?
Yes. AI model and agent security is the primary category of both on CISO Tribune.
Where are Fiddler AI and Knostic headquartered?
Knostic is headquartered in Reston, United States.
When were Fiddler AI and Knostic founded?
Fiddler AI was founded in 2018. Knostic was founded in 2023.
Who owns Fiddler AI and Knostic?
Fiddler AI is privately held. Knostic is privately held.
Who are Fiddler AI and Knostic 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. From its own pages, the company sells mainly to developers and teams that use AI coding agents and IDEs, with plans written for individual developers, growing teams, and engineering managers.
What have Fiddler AI and Knostic announced recently?
January 27, 2026: Fiddler AI announced a $30 million Series C funding round led by RPS Ventures. June 12, 2026: Knostic was recognized in the Cloud Security Alliance's first Agentic AI Security Innovator Market Map.

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

Knostic full record

  1. [1]Knostic - The control plane for agentic AI on the endpointKnostic · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]Ending llm oversharing we raised 11 million to secure enterprise aiKnostic · knostic.ai · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]Rsac 2025 innovation sandbox knostic reshaping the access control paradigm for enterprise ai securitySecurity Boulevard · securityboulevard.com · published April 25, 2025 · Tier B
  4. [4]Shadow AI Discovery & Governance - KnosticKnostic · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]Pricing - KnosticKnostic · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]AI Agent Security - KnosticKnostic · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]MCP Security Posture Management - KnosticKnostic · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Terms of Service - KnosticKnostic · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]Knostic Knostic Trust Center | Powered by SafeBaseKnostic · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]Knostic Featured Across Three Categories in CSA's Agentic AI Security Innovator Market MapKnostic · published June 12, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Prompt Injection Defense - KnosticKnostic · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A

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