Operant AI
Runtime AI defense that protects live applications, APIs and AI agents from attack.
About
Operant AI is a runtime AI application defense platform founded in 2021 by Vrajesh Bhavsar, Priyanka Tembey and Ashley Roof (Apple, Arm, Google backgrounds). Its 3D Runtime Defense discovers, detects and blocks attacks across APIs, cloud workloads and LLMs in real time, and its MCP Gateway provides runtime discovery and protection for Model Context Protocol-connected AI applications — including defense against zero-click agentic attacks like the Shadow Escape technique its research team disclosed. Backed by $13.5M ($10M Series A led by SineWave Ventures and Felicis), it is a Gartner AI TRiSM representative vendor. It is purpose-built for teams shipping AI products, not a general-purpose SOC tool.
What it can do
- Runtime discovery, detection and defense
- MCP Gateway for AI agent protection
- Zero-click agentic attack blocking
- Utility-based pricing
Setup
- Deploy with the single-step install into your Kubernetes environment
- Operant discovers APIs, workloads and AI agents at runtime
- Enable MCP Gateway for MCP-connected applications
- Set blocking policies for detected attack patterns
Prerequisites
Kubernetes or cloud workloads; AI applications or APIs to protect
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: $13.5M total ($10M Series A, Felicis + SineWave Ventures); Gartner AI TRiSM representative vendor; Shadow Escape research is public; MCP Gateway is a differentiated offering for AI agent security; Purpose-built for AI product teams, not a general SOC tool. License: Proprietary SaaS..
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 6.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 7.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 5.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 7.0/10
- · $13.5M total ($10M Series A, Felicis + SineWave Ventures)
- · Gartner AI TRiSM representative vendor; Shadow Escape research is public
- · MCP Gateway is a differentiated offering for AI agent security
- · Purpose-built for AI product teams, not a general SOC tool
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.