Both founders come from BAIR, the Berkeley lab behind Databricks and Perplexity. The CTO shipped ML at Netflix and Amazon; the CEO mixed AI security research with VC at HOF Capital. Strong founder-market fit for agent safety infra.

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AI agents are scaling faster than enterprise controls. 87% of companies lack comprehensive AI security frameworks. The guardrails market is projected to grow from $0.7B in 2024 to $109B by 2034, with most teams choosing to buy, not build.

The market is early and fragmented. Guardrails AI focuses on prompts; Snyk and Semgrep retrofit static analysis. No platform owns sandboxing, monitoring, and guardrails across the full agent lifecycle. Cascade’s end-to-end focus could let it define the stack.

Soon to be announced as a YC W26 co, Cascade is raising as enterprises begin deploying - and breaking - agents in production. With a lean team and that BAIR pedigree, they can win early design partners. But they’ll need to ship fast to own the category before others consolidate.