CISO Tribune

Vendor comparison · 2 companies

Kai vs Mave

Kai is an AI company that sells the Kai Autonomous Defense Platform, an agentic AI platform for cyber asset management, application security, infrastructure vulnerability management, and detection engineering. Mave runs investigations, searches, threat hunts, detection hardening, and governed responses across a customer's existing stack. CISO Tribune files both under AI SOC analysts and Threat intelligence. 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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  • Kai
  • Mave
Kai vs Mave: Products, Customers and Funding Compared
KaiKai is an AI company that sells the Kai Autonomous Defense Platform, an agentic AI platform for cyber asset management, application security, infrastructure vulnerability management, and detection engineering.kai.securityMaveMave runs investigations, searches, threat hunts, detection hardening, and governed responses across a customer's existing stack.mave.com
What it sells
  • Kai Autonomous Defense Platform[4][13]An agentic AI platform that executes the exposure lifecycle end to end without human handoffs.
  • Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)[7]Runs all five CTEM phases and adds auto-remediation and detection as phases six and seven.
  • Kai Watch[7]Monitors telemetry to identify active exploitation while fixes are in progress.
  • AI-native SAST[15]A SAST capability in preview for select customers.
  • AI SOC[1][14]Governed AI agents that investigate alerts, apply threat intelligence, hunt across tools, improve detections, and execute authorized response actions.
  • Threat Hunting[1][13]Runs continuous, cross-tool threat hunts for threats that never triggered an alert.
  • Detection Engineering[1][13]Finds coverage gaps, tunes noisy detection rules, and creates new detections.
  • Threat Intelligence[1][9][10][14]Converts relevant threat intelligence into investigations, threat hunts, detections, and authorized responses.
Categories
Headquarters
San Jose, United StatesNot stated on its pages
Founded
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Ownership and funding
Privately held[5]Not stated on its pages
Named customers
Not stated on its pagesNot stated on its pages
Recent news
  • July 29, 2026Kai announced findings from its 2026 State of Autonomous Defense Report and made its Auto Remediation capability available.[16]
  • March 10, 2026Kai emerged from stealth with $125 million in funding, led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from N47 and strategic investors.[11]
Not stated on its pages
G2 and Gartner Peer Insights
  • G2: Not stated on its pages
  • 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, the company sells mainly to enterprises. A blog post on its site says it has delivered autonomous security work for enterprises across multiple verticals. Its detection phase names SIEM, EDR, and XDR as the places where it deploys rules. It also says humans control the boundary between autonomous action and human review.From its own pages, Mave sells mainly to security operations teams that run many tools and want investigation, hunting, detection work, and response across the stack they already have. Mave addresses managed security service providers that want to scale without adding analysts at the same rate as customers. Mave addresses organizations with multiple SIEMs, tenants, and subsidiaries. Mave addresses organizations that want to reduce SIEM ingestion and retention costs. Mave addresses organizations that want alert triage, investigation, and response in-house, and organizations with on-premises workloads alongside cloud and SaaS. Mave also describes an alternative package for smaller teams.
Last verified
September 27, 2026October 23, 2026

Where they overlap

  • AI SOC analysts is the primary category of both Kai and Mave; both are also filed under Threat intelligence.

Where they differ, field by field

  • Kai is also filed under External attack surface management. Mave is also filed under SIEM.
  • Kai lists Kai Autonomous Defense Platform, Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), Kai Watch and AI-native SAST. Mave lists AI SOC, Threat Hunting, Detection Engineering and Threat Intelligence.
  • Kai is headquartered in San Jose, United States.
  • Kai is privately held.

How they differ

CISO Tribune files both Kai and Mave under AI SOC analysts as their primary category. Kai sells the Kai Autonomous Defense Platform, an agentic AI platform that executes the exposure lifecycle end to end without human handoffs. Kai also sells Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), Kai Watch, and an AI-native SAST capability in preview for select customers. Mave sells AI SOC, Threat Hunting, Detection Engineering, and Threat Intelligence, using governed AI agents that investigate alerts, hunt across tools, and execute authorized response actions.

Kai Watch deploys validated detection rules while fixes are in progress, and Mave creates new detections and tunes noisy detection rules. Kai remediates by writing the change, routing it to the accountable owner, or deploying a compensating detection when a patch is blocked. Mave queries live data in the systems that already hold it, with no telemetry migration, duplicate data lake, or central index required. Mave is priced by the number of endpoints a customer protects and the size of the team.

Kai is headquartered in San Jose, United States, and is privately held. Kai emerged from stealth on March 10, 2026, with $125 million in funding led by Evolution Equity Partners. On July 29, 2026, Kai announced findings from its 2026 State of Autonomous Defense Report and made its Auto Remediation capability available. Kai says it has delivered autonomous security work for Fortune 500 and Global 1000 enterprises. Mave addresses managed security service providers and organizations with multiple SIEMs, tenants, and subsidiaries.

What it sells: Kai

What Kai Autonomous Defense Platform does[4][13]
The Kai Autonomous Defense Platform executes the exposure lifecycle end to end without human handoffs. Kai aggregates findings from existing security and IT systems, determines reachability and exploitability, discards what cannot be exploited, attaches evidence to what survives, and then remediates. Kai agents interrogate CMDB, endpoint, cloud, identity, scanning, and code systems, then rebuild each asset record from the evidence they find.
What Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) does[7]
Kai runs all five phases, then adds two more: it executes the assigned fix immediately, and it watches exposed assets with targeted detection rules until remediated. Auto-remediation sits at phase six, where Kai takes immediate action once a fix is assigned.
What Kai Watch does[7]
Kai Watch continuously monitors telemetry to identify active exploitation. Kai Watch deploys validated detection rules to contain risk across the environment while fixes are in progress. Kai Watch is part of the detection phase, which Kai places at phase seven once remediation is underway.
What AI-native SAST does[15]
Kai is releasing an AI-native SAST capability in preview for select customers. Kai applies AI-native reachability analysis from the start, combining static analysis with runtime behavior to determine whether a finding is actually exploitable before it reaches a human. Kai validated each finding by automatically generating exploits and running them in an out-of-band non-production environment.

What it sells: Mave

What AI SOC does[1][14]
Mave runs an AI SOC across the security stack a customer already uses. Mave queries live data in the systems that already hold it, reasons across the evidence, and takes the next authorized action. No telemetry migration, duplicate data lake, central index, or fixed SOAR playbook is required.
What Threat Hunting does[1][13]
Mave applies threat intelligence to the customer's environment and runs continuous, cross-tool threat hunts across the SIEM, EDR, cloud, identity, and other security tools. Each finding becomes a complete investigation, a new or tuned detection, or an authorized response action. Source telemetry stays in place, with no new data lake, central index, or prebuilt correlation pipeline.
What Detection Engineering does[1][13]
Mave works across detection languages and formats, including SPL, KQL, YARA-L, Sigma, EQL, Lucene, and SQL-based rules. Agents review, create, translate, test, and tune detection content in the existing workflow, validate it against historical data where it already lives, and commit or deploy approved changes.
What Threat Intelligence does[1][9][10][14]
Mave determines which campaigns, actors, vulnerabilities, indicators, and techniques are relevant to the customer's environment. Mave evaluates each threat against assets, identities, technologies, vulnerabilities, detections, and live activity.

Questions about Kai and Mave

What do Kai and Mave sell?
Kai sells Kai Autonomous Defense Platform, Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM), Kai Watch and AI-native SAST. Mave sells AI SOC, Threat Hunting, Detection Engineering and Threat Intelligence.
Are Kai and Mave in the same category?
Yes. AI SOC analysts is the primary category of both on CISO Tribune.
Where are Kai and Mave headquartered?
Kai is headquartered in San Jose, United States.
Who owns Kai and Mave?
Kai is privately held.
Who are Kai and Mave sold to?
From its own pages, the company sells mainly to enterprises. From its own pages, Mave sells mainly to security operations teams that run many tools and want investigation, hunting, detection work, and response across the stack they already have.
What have Kai and Mave announced recently?
July 29, 2026: Kai announced findings from its 2026 State of Autonomous Defense Report and made its Auto Remediation capability available.

About Kai

Kai is an AI company that sells the Kai Autonomous Defense Platform, an agentic AI platform for cyber asset management, application security, infrastructure vulnerability management, and detection engineering. Kai says its platform is an agentic AI platform built from first principles to do security work end-to-end: gathering exhaustive context, continuously assessing risk, prioritizing action, and reducing risk. Kai describes a single agentic AI platform that does the actual security work autonomously and continuously across threat intelligence, exposure management, detection, response and beyond. Kai says its platform continuously analyzes threat intelligence, vulnerabilities, asset context, and other sources, correlates risk across the environment in real time, and can execute remediation actions.[1][6][13][14]

Kai says AI-enabled attacks arrive faster and in volumes no queue can absorb. Kai says each step of the response belongs to a different tool and team, so the exposure waits at every handoff. Kai describes a gap in which an exposure is confirmed as real and then sits exposed while a team works out how to fix it. Kai describes approved fixes that wait in a ticket queue instead of shipping. Kai says it runs every step on one platform at machine speed. Kai describes its auto-remediation as validating before acting and showing its work at every step.[4][7]

The Kai Autonomous Defense Platform executes the exposure lifecycle end to end without human handoffs. Kai aggregates findings from existing security and IT systems, determines reachability and exploitability, discards what cannot be exploited, attaches evidence to what survives, and then remediates. Kai remediates by writing the change, routing it to the accountable owner, or deploying a compensating detection when a patch is blocked. Kai agents interrogate CMDB, endpoint, cloud, identity, scanning, and code systems, then rebuild each asset record from the evidence they find. Kai writes the change itself and, where a maintenance window blocks the patch, specifies the configuration change to the controls the customer already runs. Kai says some fixes wait on a maintenance window, a vendor patch, or a release, and the exposure stays open the whole time. Kai says it builds detection for the customer environment.[4][9]

Kai says Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) promised a repeatable path from exposure to fix: scope, discover, prioritize, validate, mobilize. Kai runs all five phases, then adds two more: it executes the assigned fix immediately, and it watches exposed assets with targeted detection rules until remediated. Auto-remediation sits at phase six, where Kai takes immediate action once a fix is assigned instead of letting it wait in a queue. Kai executes an assigned fix directly for the majority of confirmed findings. For the complex few findings that need human review, Kai builds the complete remediation plan, identifies the right owner, and stages it for approval. Kai Watch continuously monitors telemetry to identify active exploitation and deploys validated detection rules to contain risk across the environment while fixes are in progress.[4][7]

Kai determines which vulnerabilities are truly reachable and exploitable, then uses AI-native prioritization to rank them by actual risk. While remediation is underway, Kai creates and deploys detection rules to identify exploitation attempts in real time. Kai is releasing an AI-native SAST capability in preview for select customers. In its SAST capability, Kai applies AI-native reachability analysis from the start, combining static analysis with runtime behavior to determine whether a finding is actually exploitable before it reaches a human. Kai validated each finding by automatically generating exploits and running them in an out-of-band non-production environment.[10][15]

Kai was founded by the creators of the category-defining companies Claroty and SecurityMatters. Galina Antova and Dr. Damiano Bolzoni previously built Claroty and SecurityMatters. Kai emerged from stealth with $125 million in funding. Kai says dozens of design partners iterated with it until the vision became something real. Kai says it has delivered autonomous security work across multiple use cases for Fortune 500 and Global 1000 enterprises across multiple verticals. Kai announced the appointment of Alfredo Hickman as Chief Information Security Officer. Kai Cyber Inc. lists its address as 90 Skyport Drive, Suite 200, San Jose, CA 95110.[1][2][4][6][7][9][10][13][14]

Kai on the record

Sources

Kai full record

  1. [1]kai.securityKai · kai.security · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]Kai emerges from stealth with 125m powering machine speed defense to outpace ai enabled adversaries 302708978Kai via PR Newswire · prnewswire.co.uk · published March 10, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]kai.securityKai Cyber Inc. · kai.security · undated page, accessed September 27, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Kai Autonomous Defense Platform | End-to-End Agentic Risk ReductionKai · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]PlatformKai · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]We Aren’t Building a Better Tool. We’re Rebuilding Security. | Kai AI-Native Autonomous Defense PlatformKai · published March 10, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]Continuous Threat Exposure Management | Solutions at KaiKai · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Our Story & Manifesto | Kai Agentic AI PlatformKai · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]Cyber Asset Attack Surface ManagementKai · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]Mythos | Solutions at KaiKai · undated page, accessed October 26, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Kai Emerges from Stealth with $125M, Powering Machine-Speed Defense to Outpace AI-Enabled AdversariesKai · published March 10, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Kai Appoints Alfredo Hickman as CISO to Usher in the Future of AI-Driven Security | Kai Autonomous Defense PlatformKai · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]New Research from Kai: UK CISOs Face a Widening AI Security Gap as Attackers Gain the Advantage | Kai Autonomous Defense PlatformKai · published September 21, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]Joining Kai as CISO: Rebuilding Security for the AI Era | Kai Autonomous Defense PlatformKai · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  15. [15]Kai product update: AI-native SAST and deeper vulnerability validation through membership in Anthropic's Cyber Verification Program | Kai Autonomous Defense PlatformKai · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  16. [16]New Research from Kai: CISOs Say AI Is Accelerating Cyber Threats, Driving the Shift to Machine-Led SecurityPR Newswire · published July 29, 2026 · Tier A

Mave full record

  1. [1]mave.comMave · mave.com · undated page, accessed October 23, 2026 · Tier A
  2. [2]Terms and conditionsMave · mave.com · published February 15, 2026 · Tier A
  3. [3]AI Security Operations Platform | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  4. [4]Mave Platform | The SecOps Operating SystemMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  5. [5]Reduce MDR Reliance | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  6. [6]SIEM Cost Reduction & Replacement | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  7. [7]On-Prem SecOps Deployment | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  8. [8]Multi-SIEM & Post-M&A SecOps | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  9. [9]Multi-Tenant SecOps For MSSPs | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  10. [10]Threat Hunting | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  11. [11]Detection Engineering with MITRE ATT&CK | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  12. [12]Threat Intelligence | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  13. [13]Pricing | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A
  14. [14]AI SOC Agents for Full-Loop SecOps | MaveMave · undated page, accessed November 10, 2026 · Tier A

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