A startup called Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC) announced a $40 million Series A round on September 15, 2026, aimed at giving enterprises an independent way to assess whether their AI agents are safe to deploy.
The round was led by Ribbit Capital, with participation from First Harmonic. AIUC previously raised a $15 million seed round from investors including Nat Friedman’s fund NFDG, Emergence, Terrain, and Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann. Total funding now stands at $55 million.
AIUC was founded by brothers-in-law Rune Kvist and Rajiv Dattani. Kvist is an early Anthropic employee; Dattani served as COO of AI safety research organization METR from 2024 to 2025 and remains a board member there. The company counts Cursor, Lovable, Harvey, and ElevenLabs among its customers.
The company’s core product is a certification standard called AIUC-1, modeled on the widely used cybersecurity standard SOC 2. To develop it, AIUC assembled a consortium of roughly 250 security and risk leaders and asked them what they look for when evaluating AI agents. Their feedback shapes a suite of approximately 5,000 tests that probe agents for vulnerabilities including jailbreaks, hallucinations, and data leaks. The process produces a roughly 100-page report. AI agents run the tests and analyze results, while humans verify the final audit.
“Banks, hospitals, governments and militaries no longer decline to deploy AI because a model isn’t smart enough,” Kvist said. “They decline because they’ve made commitments to their own customers about what a system will and won’t do, and nobody can currently guarantee that.”
The approach addresses a gap that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has also flagged publicly, calling for third-party evaluators to observe and verify AI safety as bad-behavior incidents increase. AIUC’s model could offer enterprises a structured path to that kind of independent assurance before they commit to deploying an agent.
Source: TechCrunch