TLDR: Aurva, an AI observability and access monitoring startup, has emerged from stealth with $2.2 million in seed funding led by Nexus Venture Partners. The company, founded by former Meta engineers, offers a unified platform for real-time, identity-centric monitoring of data access by humans, services, and AI agents. This funding will be used to expand its engineering team, enhance AI observability features, and scale operations globally, addressing the critical need for advanced data security in dynamic AI environments.
Aurva, a pioneering startup in AI observability and access monitoring, has officially launched from stealth mode, announcing a successful oversubscribed seed funding round of $2.2 million. The investment was spearheaded by Nexus Venture Partners, with notable participation from DeVC and a consortium of industry leaders, including former Meta executives Chris Bream, Rahul Sood, Karandeep Anand, and Mala Ramakrishnan, as well as Postman founders Ankit Sobti and Abhinav Asthana.
Founded by former Meta engineers Apurv Garg (CEO), Krishna Bagadia (CTO), and Akash Mondal (Chief Architect), Aurva aims to redefine data security for the AI era. The company’s platform provides identity-centric runtime monitoring, offering enterprises real-time, end-to-end visibility into how sensitive data is accessed, by whom (whether human, service, or AI agent), and for what purpose. This approach is a significant departure from traditional, static access control methods.
According to Apurv Garg, CEO of Aurva, “Existing tools were built for static environments. But AI is dynamic, it’s everywhere, and it just runs. There are now countless ways data gets accessed, often without visibility. Enterprises need to rethink how they monitor sensitive data usage in real time; across humans, services, and AI agents. That’s why we built Aurva: to bring observability to AI usage and connect it directly to data access and flows.” The company’s methodology is inspired by Meta’s internal data security systems, particularly the Hipster platform, adapting these lessons for high-scale enterprises grappling with the security implications of AI-driven workloads.
Aurva’s technology leverages eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter), a kernel-level sandboxing approach utilized by tech giants like Google, Netflix, and Meta, to achieve real-time, low-overhead monitoring. This platform unifies query intelligence, agentic access monitoring, AI observability, and egress detection, enabling organizations to identify overprivileged access, unauthorized AI usage, and risky data flows across various services.
The startup has already garnered a strong customer base, serving dozens of enterprise clients in fintech, SaaS, and banking sectors. Notable customers include Forbes Cloud 100 payment provider Razorpay and Meesho, a Meta-backed social commerce platform with 100 million monthly users. Aurva highlights impressive customer milestones, including monitoring over 4 billion transactions per day at a major financial institution, analyzing over 1 billion queries daily at a leading digital bank, and auto-discovering and tracking more than 2,000 AI applications and agents at a large e-commerce provider.
Ashwath Kumar, Head of Security at Razorpay, praised Aurva’s capabilities: “Aurva gives us real-time, identity aware visibility into data access, helping us prevent unauthorized use and privilege escalation while meeting regulatory guidelines. As access becomes more agentic and ephemeral, we rely on Aurva to tie queries to identities and flag anomalies. It is a critical layer in keeping production safe at scale.”
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners, emphasized the timely nature of Aurva’s solution: “Security teams urgently need a runtime-first approach to data security, especially as AI systems autonomously interact with sensitive enterprise data. Aurva’s team has proven that they can build at scale, and they are bringing a robust enterprise-grade solution to market at the right time.”
Chris Bream, a former Security Executive at Meta and an angel investor in the round, added, “With the rapid growth of AI, understanding which identities, especially non-human ones, are accessing your data and how they are doing it has never been more important. Aurva is redefining what access monitoring should mean in an era of autonomous agents and service-based access by tying activity back to real identities. Their eBPF-based architecture offers a refreshing and modern approach, enabling flexible, low-overhead deployment. With their background in data systems and advanced threat actors, Apurv and Krishna have built a powerful platform that addresses real security problems.”
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The newly secured funding will be strategically deployed to expand Aurva’s engineering team, further deepen its AI observability capabilities, and meet the growing demand from enterprise customers across the U.S. and other global markets. Aurva is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
