Knostic

Knostic is the first AI security platform built to enforce need-to-know access controls for enterprise large language models, governing the knowledge layer between static data and AI answers so tools like Microsoft 365 Copilot, Glean, and Google Gemini do not overshare sensitive corporate data. Its core insight is that traditional IAM and DLP operate at the data level (who can open which file), while enterprise LLMs operate at the knowledge level and introduce an inference risk unique to AI: even when an employee lacks direct access to a document, an assistant can infer restricted information from what it can reach. Knostic captures, defines, and manages per-user, per-topic need-to-know policies, the context for LLM access decisions that until now was never explicitly codified, and enforces them dynamically at runtime by redacting or blocking outputs that exceed a user's permissions or context. It detects oversharing, undersharing, and inference risks by simulating real employee queries across enterprise assistants to uncover exposure paths before users do, and its Copilot Readiness Assessment lets organizations proactively discover what sensitive content is exposed, serving as a deployment safety net whether or not Copilot is being rolled out. The platform provides knowledge-graph visibility, accelerates data classification by applying need-to-know policies, and delivers forensic audit trails logging which data sources contributed to each AI answer, aligning to the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, and the NIST AI RMF. Founded in 2023 by Gadi Evron and Sounil Yu, backed by $19.3M, SOC 2 Type II certified, and uniquely a winner of both the RSA 2024 Launch Pad and Black Hat 2024 Startup Spotlight plus an RSAC 2025 Innovation Sandbox finalist, Knostic occupies a distinct route into the AI-agent-security cluster: not runtime attack detection or red teaming, but knowledge-layer access governance for the enterprise AI assistants employees already use.