Asymptote Labs raises $5.5m seed to watch what AI coding agents do

Asymptote Labs raises $5.5m seed to watch what AI coding agents do

20 October 2026: Asymptote Labs, a New York start-up that records and polices what AI agents do on company machines, has raised an oversubscribed $5.5 million seed round led by Tower Research Ventures, the venture arm of trading firm Tower Research Capital. It will spend the money on engineering, product development, hiring and go-to-market.

Not yet independently verified. The round, the GitHub growth figure and the production use by regulated enterprises are stated by Asymptote Labs; we found no second report beyond a funding listing. The company does not give its founding year. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

Investors, including one already testing the product

Lytical Ventures, 1984 Ventures and South Park Commons joined the round. Angel investors include Kevin Tian and Rahul Madduluri, co-founders of the social engineering defence firm Doppel, and Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder of the software supply chain security company Socket.

Tower is a customer as much as an investor. "Now our security team is putting Beacon through its paces on our own endpoints, because as agents take on real work, visibility and control over what they do can't be an afterthought," said Jared Young, director of venture capital at Tower Research Ventures, which found the company through its open-source project.

Beacon and the platform on top of it

Beacon is Asymptote's open-source telemetry layer, released under the MIT licence. It captures what agents do across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and more than 20 other agent tools, and maps it onto a common data model that extends OpenTelemetry, the standard most observability products already read. The company says Beacon's GitHub stars grew more than 460% in September and that the project reached third place on GitHub's global trending list.

The paid platform sits on Beacon. It intercepts live agent activity and applies guardrails at both the prompt and the tool level, blocking risky actions before they run, with detections for data leakage, insider threats, AI supply chain risk and wasteful agent workflows. Asymptote says security teams at regulated enterprises already run it in production.

"We built Beacon as open source because we believe every organization should own that data," said Justin D'Souza, co-founder and chief executive. Lucas Nelson, managing partner at Lytical Ventures, called it "that system of record" for agent activity.

A security team's problem before it is anyone else's

D'Souza and co-founder Shukan Shah were early engineers at Doppel, where D'Souza built a real-time detection platform that scaled from 1 million to more than 1 billion domains a day and Shah led security operations automation. Both then went through South Park Commons' founder fellowship, and the team includes people from the security research firm Trail of Bits.

The pitch lands where coding agents are spreading fastest: developers install them on their own laptops, and security teams discover them afterwards. Our AI security category lists three products and our agentic AI category 13, a sign of how new the control side of the market still is. Asymptote says it will move from security towards reliability, governance and AI spending control once the telemetry layer is in place.

Company profile on TrustList: Asymptote Labs

Sources

• Asymptote Labs: Asymptote Labs raises $5.5M seed round, 20 October 2026