Sondera is the winner of the ninth annual DataTribe Challenge, held at the Cyber Innovation Conference (CIC) 2026. Congratulations to Josh Devon and the entire Sondera team, and to every finalist who took the stage this year.
The problem: trusting what agents do
AI agents are moving from answering questions to taking real actions: running commands, calling tools, touching data and changing systems. As they take on more work, organizations need a way to know those agents are doing what they are supposed to, and nothing more.
Traditional controls were built for people and fixed software. An agent can use valid credentials and approved tools and still take an action no one intended. A series of harmless-looking steps can add up to something that breaks policy.
What Sondera does: semantic integrity for AI agents
Sondera brings what it calls “semantic integrity” to AI agents. Teams write their rules in plain language, and Sondera checks every agent action against those rules before it runs.
- Plain-language rules, enforced as code. Rules written in everyday language are turned into deterministic checks on agent actions.
- Checks before the action, not after. Model calls and tool calls are evaluated before they execute. An action can be blocked, steered toward a safer alternative or escalated to a person.
- Whole-run awareness. Sondera tracks the agent’s full trajectory, so it can catch a sequence of steps that is harmless alone but violates policy together.
- Adversarial simulation. Policies are stress-tested against simulated attacks before they are relied on in production.
The result is a practical way for security and engineering teams to give agents real work while keeping them inside the lines the organization has set.
About the DataTribe Challenge
The DataTribe Challenge is an annual competition for early-stage cybersecurity startups, now in its ninth year. Finalists receive coaching on their messaging and pitch, then present live to judges, investors and the security community. The pitches take place on Day 2 of the Cyber Innovation Conference.
Thank you to all of this year’s finalists. It was a privilege to work with each team, and the quality of the pitches made the judges’ job a hard one.
