Artificial intelligence agent certification startup Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company today announced it has raised $40 million in new funding to begin auditing frontier AI models.

Until now, its work has covered only the agents that companies build on those models. AIUC argues that uncertainty over risk now slows AI adoption more than any shortfall in what the technology can do.

Rune Kvist, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said most enterprises have a list of agents that were approved in pilots but “stalled at the security review.” Proof of security and reliability has become the main bottleneck, he added.

The standard at the center of the business is called AIUC-1. Certification means running an agent through about 5,000 combinations of risk and attack tailored to the type of business deploying it, with jailbreaks, hallucinations and data leaks among the failures tested for. Each agent is audited independently and recertified every quarter as attack techniques change. Much of the testing is done by AI agents, with humans verifying the final audit, according to TechCrunch.

Voice AI company Eleven Labs Inc. used its certification in February to secure what it described as first-of-its-kind insurance for AI agents, including coverage for a voice agent that gives a customer incorrect information. Cursor developer Anysphere Inc. and legal AI company Harvey AI Corp. hold the certification too. KPMG LLP, Lovable Labs Inc. and UiPath Inc. are also on the list, as is customer service software maker Fin, formerly Intercom Inc. Shaping the standard is a consortium of more than 250 security and risk leaders from Fortune 1000 companies, who also push for its adoption inside their own organizations.

Kvist and his co-founder, Rajiv Dattani, came to AIUC from different corners of the problem. Kvist was Anthropic PBC’s first product hire. Dattani spent time as a partner in McKinsey & Co.’s insurance practice, then served as chief operating officer of AI model evaluation nonprofit METR.

“When electricity was burning down houses, the insurers paying the bill funded Underwriters Laboratories to test and certify products,” Dattani said. “To this day, the UL mark is on most light bulbs across America. AI needs the same combination of standards, testing and insurance.”

AIUC started with applications because security reviews blocked rollouts there first. The company says the same pressure is now building around frontier models. Proceeds from the round will extend its audit and insurance work to that layer, part of what AIUC describes as an ecosystem for frontier oversight for the most advanced AI systems.

Ribbit Capital led the Series A with participation from First Harmonic. Nat Friedman at NFDG led a $15 million seed round when the company launched in July 2025, and investors have now put $55 million into AIUC in total.

Micky Malka, founder and managing partner of Ribbit Capital, said his firm has spent more than a decade backing financial services companies in a sector where trust counts for more than anything else. AI is heading down the same road, he said, “and it is moving faster than the systems companies use to evaluate it.”

Image: AIUC/GPT Image 2.5