Folksoft and NuGuard AI Announce Stronger Together Partnership

Bringing pre-production AI behavioral validation into expert-led, automated compliance, so AI-native startups can prove their AI is safe, secure and audit-certified.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — October 25, 2026 — Folksoft, whose automated GRC platform and dedicated virtual CISO (vCISO) help more than 50 startups and scaleups achieve and maintain compliance across 20-plus frameworks, and NuGuard AI, maker of the open-source-based AI Trust Platform for behavioral validation, today announced a strategic partnership that makes AI behavior a provable part of the compliance program. The alliance is built to close the “Behavior Gap” — the distance between how an AI agent is intended to act and how it actually behaves in production — and turn that proof into audit-certified evidence for startups selling into regulated industries such as BFSI, healthcare and eCommerce

“AI-native startups can no longer close enterprise deals on a SOC 2 report alone as buyers now want proof that the AI itself behaves as intended,” said Ranjan Goel, CEO and Founder of NuGuard AI. “Folksoft already owns the compliance outcome for its customers. With our AI Trust Platform in the program, Folksoft can show auditors and enterprise buyers validated evidence of how every AI application behaves.”

Automated Compliance. Provable AI Trust.

The combined offering is designed to remove a fast-growing blocker in security reviews that now ask how a vendor’s AI behaves, not just how its infrastructure is secured. Folksoft contributes an automated GRC platform that connects to AWS, Azure, GCP and more than 50 business apps, collects and maps evidence to controls automatically, monitors continuously with AI-driven fixes for misconfigurations, and publishes audit-certified reports and a public Trust Center. Every customer is paired from Day 1 with a dedicated vCISO who runs gap and risk assessments, writes policies, coordinates annual penetration testing and the AICPA audit, and meets weekly through a shared Slack channel. Folksoft clients spend about one hour a week on compliance on average and reach SOC 2 readiness in one to two weeks.

NuGuard AI brings continuous behavioral validation of AI applications to ensure their safety and security match company policies and relevant frameworks. NuGuard AI discovers every model, tool and API in an organization’s AI stack, defines a behavioral policy for each application, and runs more than 1,000 adversarial tests per AI application inside a sandbox. Each validation produces an audit-ready evidence package — behavior policy, test results and reporting aligned to OWASP, NIST AI and PCI requirements — those Folksoft maps to controls across frameworks such as SOC 2, ISO 27001 and ISO 42001. Customers who use both solutions can realize a substantial improvement in AI risk posture, with AI controls evidenced in days rather than months.

“Our customers are building AI products, and their buyers’ security questionnaires now go well past SOC 2,” said Viresh Managooli, CEO and Co-Founder of Folksoft. “We promise one partner for the platform, the expertise and the audit. NuGuard’s behavioral validation extends that promise to AI: our vCISOs can now hand auditors and customers proof that an agent behaves as intended, not just a policy that says it should.”

A Widening Trust Gap

The partnership addresses a gap that is widening as AI adoption outpaces control. The partnership addresses a gap that is widening as AI adoption outpaces control. Cisco’s State of AI Security 2026 report notes that while 83% of organizations planned to deploy agentic AI, only 29% felt truly ready to do so securely. The cost of that gap is now measurable: IBM’s 2026 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that more than 20% of organizations suffered a breach targeting their AI models or applications, and that AI-enabled breaches cost $6 million on average. And Netskope’s 2026 AI Risk and Readiness Report, a survey of 1,253 cybersecurity and IT professionals, found that while 73% of organizations have deployed AI, only 7% govern it with real-time policy enforcement, and 91% learn what an AI agent did only after it acts.

Smaller companies are even more exposed. A 2026 IDC study commissioned by Sage of 2,210 small and midsize businesses found that 81% are unprepared or only in the early stages of preparing for AI-related threats, and 22% have no dedicated protections for their AI applications. For startups, that gap shows up as stalled security reviews and longer sales cycles, as enterprise buyers ask vendors to prove how their AI behaves. Folksoft and NuGuard AI built this partnership to close the gap before the audit and the security review, not after a lost deal.

Get Started

Folksoft customers and prospects can obtain a free weeklong assessment and design session with a report on architecture and behavior policy aligned with industry best practices from NuGuard. Request your free assessment, or book a free discovery call with Folksoft’s GRC experts.

About Folksoft

Folksoft is the compliance co-founder for startups and scaleups, pairing an automated GRC platform with a dedicated virtual CISO (vCISO) so teams achieve and maintain compliance without hiring a compliance team. More than 50 startups and scaleups trust Folksoft across 20-plus frameworks — including SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, GDPR and NIST — with more than 50 integrations for automated evidence collection. Folksoft Inc. is headquartered in Plano, Texas, with offices in the US, Brussels and India. Learn more at folksoft.tech.

About NuGuard AI

NuGuard AI is the open-source-based AI Trust Platform for agentic AI, helping enterprises close the Behavior Gap — the distance between an AI agent’s intended behavior and its real-world execution — before production. The platform is trusted by developers worldwide with over 46,000 downloads of our open-source toolkit in the last few months. NuGuard AI is headquartered in San Jose, California. Learn more at nuguard.ai.

Media Contact

Sam Kumarsamy, Marketing Leader, NuGuard AI [email protected]