Harbor Emerges From Stealth with $10M Funding to Handle AI-Agent Risk

New company Harbor said it has emerged from stealth to help with the risks of deploying AI agents.

San Francisco-based Harbor starts with $10 million in seed funding from Base10 Partners, Abstract and 8VC.

Harbor said it helps companies measure and mitigate the operational, security, and regulatory risks of AI agents, insuring them if the agent fails or causes a loss. Harbor works with banks, insurers and other regulated companies in the United States, Europe and Latin America.

Historically, when an employee makes a mistake, the company is covered, said Harbor. Professional liability, cyber, and tech E&O policies pay for the damage. But with AI agents, a mistake is repeated – possibly thousands of times – until someone notices.

When it comes to AI agents, insurers do not have the claims history to price the risk. So some insurers are excluding AI out of existing policies, Harbor said.

Harbor is building the solution and works in two ways:

• The first is the risk platform. Harbor finds every AI agent a company runs and builds an inventory of them. It measures the operational, security and regulatory risk of each one, using a risk framework built with research and enterprise partners and mapped to the main AI frameworks and regulations, from NIST AI RMF and SR 26-2 to the EU AI Act. It checks every decision against the company’s own rules and blocks the ones that break them before they go through. Every time an agent’s model, tools or data change, Harbor measures it again.
• The second is insurance. The measurement is what makes the risk insurable. The risk that remains, Harbor insures. Insurance also changes the incentives: when the insurer pays for the loss, it has every reason to make the measurement rigorous and the controls work.

“Companies need to understand the risk of their agents, and at the current pace of adoption and development, assessing the risk at a specific point in time seems useless. There is a need for an innovative solution for managing the risk in real time,” said Jesús Santos, co-founder of Harbor.

Santos is one of four founders who met at Stanford University. Daniel Elechiguerra, Cristian Bartolomé, and Luis Botín are the other founders of the company.

Topics InsurTech Data Driven Artificial Intelligence Mergers & Acquisitions Agencies