AIUC raises $40M Series A to build a UL-style certification layer for AI agents

AIUC (Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company) announced a $40 million Series A on September 15, led by Ribbit Capital with First Harmonic and Terrain participating. With a $15 million seed round from NFDG, total funding is $55 million. The company was founded by Rune Kvist, an early Anthropic employee, and Rajiv Dattani, former COO of AI evaluation nonprofit METR.

Certify agents the way UL certified appliances

AIUC draws the historical parallel itself: "electricity burned down houses until insurers funded Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to certify products." Its AIUC-1 standard tests AI agents against roughly 5,000 risk-and-attack combinations, including jailbreaks, hallucinations and data leaks, built with input from more than 250 security and risk leaders. Customers already certifying against it include Cursor, ElevenLabs, Harvey, KPMG, Lovable, UiPath and Fin.

Kvist told TechCrunch the problem is trust. "AI is getting smarter at an increasingly rapid rate," he said, but that doesn't make adoption easier for regulated industries. He said "banks, hospitals, governments and militaries" hold back because "nobody can currently guarantee" a model will stay inside the commitments those institutions have made to their own customers.

What it means for agent spend

AIUC-1 is a third-party answer to a question every AI buyer asks internally: can this agent's output be trusted without a human re-checking it? If AIUC-1 or something like it becomes a requirement before enterprises expand agent deployments, certification status becomes part of the buying decision. Ask your agent vendors whether they've certified, and against what.