Fiddler AI Raises $30M to Build Control Plane for Enterprise AI

PALO ALTO, CA – January 27, 2026 – Fiddler AI, a company at the forefront of AI observability and security, has secured $30 million in a Series C funding round led by RPS Ventures. The investment, which brings Fiddler's total funding to a significant $100 million, is earmarked to accelerate its vision of creating a "neutral control plane" for the increasingly complex and autonomous AI systems being deployed across enterprises.

The round saw participation from a strong contingent of existing investors, including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lux Capital, and Insight Partners, alongside new strategic backers like LG Technology Ventures and Benhamou Global Ventures. The influx of capital highlights a critical turning point in the enterprise AI landscape: as companies move beyond simple predictive models to embrace powerful, autonomous AI agents, the need for robust governance and control has become paramount.

The Growing AI Governance Gap

The rapid adoption of AI has created what industry experts call an "AI governance gap." Enterprises are increasingly deploying sophisticated AI agents that can reason, interact with other software, and make independent decisions in customer-facing and business-critical workflows. However, the tools to monitor, manage, and secure these autonomous systems have not kept pace, leaving businesses exposed to significant operational, financial, and reputational risks.

"The explosion of AI tools has created a significant gap in enterprise governance," said Timothy Murphy, Partner at RPS Ventures, who led the investment. "Companies are deploying agents that interact with customers and make consequential decisions, but they're monitoring them with fragmented point solutions built for simpler, deterministic use cases."

This gap is more than a technical challenge. A single workflow for an AI agent can involve dozens of interactions between different models, internal databases, and external APIs. Each handoff represents a potential point of failure, a security vulnerability, or an opportunity for unintended behavior, such as generating factually incorrect information ("hallucinations") or leaking sensitive data. For companies in highly regulated sectors like financial services, healthcare, and insurance, where compliance and auditability are non-negotiable, these risks can lead to crippling fines and legal battles.

Fiddler AI aims to close this gap. The company has seen its revenue grow more than 400% in the last 18 months, a testament to the urgent market demand for solutions that can tame the "wild west" of autonomous AI.

Building the Control Plane for Compound AI

Fiddler’s answer to the governance gap is its AI Control Plane, a concept central to its strategy and product development. Krishna Gade, co-founder and CEO of Fiddler, draws a parallel to a previous technological shift. “Every major platform shift requires new infrastructure. When companies moved to the cloud, they needed orchestration layers. As they deploy autonomous agents, they need a control plane,” he explained.

This control plane is designed to be a unified, system-level layer that provides a single source of truth for all AI activity within an organization. It offers:
* Standardized Telemetry: Collecting consistent performance and behavior data across all AI models and agents.
* Reliable Evaluation: Continuously assessing model quality, safety, and accuracy.
* Continuous Monitoring: Tracking for performance degradation, data drift, and security threats like prompt injection attacks in real time.
* Enforceable Policy: Allowing companies to set and enforce rules that govern agent behavior, ensuring alignment with business policies and regulatory requirements.
* Auditable Governance: Creating a complete, transparent record of all AI decisions for compliance and auditing purposes.

Unlike point solutions that may only focus on one aspect of the AI lifecycle, such as developer-level debugging, Fiddler's platform is positioned as a "batteries-included" system. It features a proprietary Fiddler Trust Service, powered by fine-tuned models that act as high-speed guardrails to detect and mitigate risks like toxicity and PII leakage with latency under 100 milliseconds.

“Our years building trust infrastructure gave us the foundation to solve this—understanding not just what agents do, but why they do it," Gade stated. "That's the difference between monitoring tools and mission-critical infrastructure."

Venture Capital Bets Big on AI Trust and Safety

The $30 million Series C round is a strong signal that venture capital is increasingly focused on the infrastructure needed to make AI safe, reliable, and scalable. The involvement of top-tier firms like RPS Ventures, Lightspeed, and Insight Partners, coupled with strategic investors like LG Technology Ventures, suggests a market shift. The initial gold rush to fund foundational model developers is now being balanced by significant investment in the picks-and-shovels companies that enable enterprises to use AI responsibly and effectively.

Fiddler's impressive growth and expanding customer base have clearly resonated with investors. The company has not only achieved AWS Pattern Partners status, validating its architecture on the world's leading cloud platform, but was also named the #1 company in AI Agent Security & Risk Management by industry analyst firm CB Insights.

This funding validates the thesis that as AI becomes more powerful and autonomous, the value of control, visibility, and trust skyrockets. Investors are betting that the platform that becomes the definitive system of record for enterprise AI will be one of the most valuable companies in the next technology wave.

From Observability to Enterprise-Wide Impact

Fiddler's vision is already translating into tangible business outcomes for its customers. The platform's ability to provide a unified view of all AI systems is helping large organizations streamline operations and de-risk their AI investments.

Karthik Rao, CEO of Nielsen, a major Fiddler customer, commented on the platform's strategic importance. “Fiddler has delivered unified observability, protection, and governance across agents and predictive models making it fundamental to our AI strategy," Rao said. "We are especially looking forward to the upcoming rollout of the control plane and the intelligent orchestration it will bring as our AI footprint grows.”

Other case studies reinforce this impact. Integral Ad Science, a global media measurement firm, uses Fiddler to reduce monitoring costs and demonstrate responsible AI practices. The platform has even been deployed by the U.S. Navy, where it reportedly decreased the time needed to update critical models by 97%.

With its new capital, Fiddler plans to deepen its penetration into regulated industries and expand its integrations across the broader AI ecosystem. The goal is to make its control plane the ubiquitous infrastructure for any enterprise serious about deploying AI at scale.

"Building trust into AI has been our mission since day one—trust that systems perform as expected, that risks are managed proactively, and that AI investments deliver measurable returns," Gade concluded. "The control plane for compound AI systems is how we deliver trust at scale."