Clawvisor and Cyera are both AI security tools but sit at different layers: Clawvisor is a free, open-source authorization gateway from Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch that brokers AI agent credentials, while Cyera is a data security platform valued at $12 billion that discovers and classifies sensitive data before agents can reach it.
Summary: If you are a small team wiring agents into Gmail or GitHub, Clawvisor's free, self-hosted gateway stops credential leaks for zero dollars. If you run security at a company facing a compliance audit, Cyera's data classification platform, now backed by over $2 billion in funding, answers a different question entirely.
Clawvisor is built and maintained by exactly one person, as of August 2026. Cyera just raised $600 million at a $12 billion valuation. Both sit under the same "AI security posture management" tag on tool directories that track this category, and that shared tag is doing too much.
The confusion is understandable. Search for an AI agent security tool and both names surface, often in the same list, with a similar one-line pitch about protecting data from agents. Read past the pitch and the two products do not compete for the same dollar or solve the same failure.
Clawvisor, backed by Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch, stops an AI agent from ever holding the API keys and OAuth tokens it needs to act. Cyera, valued at $12 billion after its June 2026 round, stops sensitive data from reaching an agent's context in the first place. A team that buys one has not covered the other. Most that reach Cyera's price point still need something in Clawvisor's category too.
Pick Clawvisor if you are a small team giving an agent real access to Gmail, GitHub, or Slack, and the risk keeping you up at night is an API key leaking out of an agent's memory or a .env file. It is free to self-host and open source, and a working deployment takes an afternoon, not a procurement cycle.
Pick Cyera if you run security at a company that already has, or needs, a five-figure-minimum budget for data discovery, and the question nobody can answer is where the sensitive data already lives before any agent goes near it. It deploys agentless, connects to cloud accounts in minutes according to its own product pages, and carries SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification that Clawvisor, by its own admission, does not.
Does Cyera broker agent credentials the way Clawvisor does? It does not. Does Clawvisor classify a single file of customer data? It does not either. That gap is the whole article.
Clawvisor's free cloud trial requires no credit card, and the self-hosted version, a Go 1.25 backend with a React 18 frontend, is free and open source under the license posted in its repository. As of today, that GitHub repository carries 265 stars and 753 commits. An enterprise tier exists for single sign-on and private cloud deployment, but Clawvisor has not published a rate for it anywhere verifiable, so this article will not invent one.
Cyera charges enterprise-only rates with no public price list. Market estimates put the cost near $2,000 per terabyte scanned, with a typical minimum engagement around $50,000 a year, though Cyera has not confirmed either figure itself.
What Cyera has confirmed, in its own funding announcement, is the scale behind that pricing. Annual recurring revenue has tripled year over year for three straight years and passed $150 million by June 2026, according to TechCrunch's reporting on a round priced at an 80-times revenue multiple. Cyera also told TechCrunch it remains far from profitable and is spending faster than it earns, partly on roughly 500 sales jobs added in 2026 alone.
Clawvisor's three-layer authorization model rests on one idea: an agent should never see a raw credential. When an agent needs to act, it declares the task first. A human approves the scope once, through a web dashboard, a Telegram bot, or a mobile push notification. From there, Clawvisor injects the credential server-side, scores every request for risk before it runs, and blocks anything that drifts outside the approved scope.
It covers 14 service adapters today, including Gmail, GitHub, Slack, Notion, Stripe, and Dropbox, with Jira, Salesforce, and Airtable in development. It also exposes an MCP server with OAuth 2.1, so it plugs directly into Claude Desktop or any other MCP-compatible client. Founder Eric Levine built the product after co-founding Berbix, an identity-verification company Socure acquired for $70 million in 2023, and after leading Trust and Safety engineering at Airbnb.
Clawvisor's own GitHub README does not soften the risk of running it: "It has not been audited for security," the repository states, warning against using it "as your sole safeguard for sensitive data or critical systems." A YC-listed team of one is exactly why that warning matters.
Cyera's AI Guardian suite answers a different question: not what an agent may do, but what data already exists and where. Its classification engine claims better than 95% precision by reading data in business context instead of matching regex patterns, and it deploys agentless, meaning no software installs on the systems it scans.
At RSAC 2026 in March, Cyera added three pieces aimed at agents specifically. Browser Shield inspects prompts before they leave the browser, so an employee pasting a customer record into a public chatbot gets blocked, alerted, or allowed based on what they typed. Data Lineage maps how a file moves, gets copied, or gets transformed as an agent handles it, reconstructing the trail for an incident investigation later.
And Cyera MCP, which launched March 24, 2026, lets a security analyst query Cyera's own data map in plain language from inside Claude Code, Microsoft Copilot, or Cursor. Cyera says it holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certification and was named a Leader in Forrester's Q2 2026 Wave for sensitive data discovery.
There is a third layer this comparison keeps sidestepping: the model's own behavior at runtime. HiddenLayer scans more than 35 machine learning model formats for backdoors, blocks prompt injection as it happens, and tracks what an agent actually does once it is running, a job neither Clawvisor nor Cyera claims.
A team that locks down credentials with Clawvisor and data exposure with Cyera can still ship a model that was tampered with upstream. That gap is not this article's subject. Pretending the stack has two layers instead of three would be its own kind of omission.
Take a specific case: a four-person startup building an internal agent that reads support tickets from Gmail, files bugs in GitHub, and posts a daily summary to Slack. There is no security budget line item, and the team cannot justify a $50,000 minimum engagement for a workflow that touches three services. Clawvisor's free, self-hosted path covers exactly that. The task-based approval model means the founder reviews scope once instead of clicking approve every time the agent runs.
Take the opposite case: a healthcare company's security team already answers to HIPAA and SOC 2 auditors, with patient records spread across AWS, Microsoft 365, and an on-premises file share nobody has fully mapped in five years. Adding AI agents to that environment without knowing where the sensitive files already sit is the real emergency, and a credential gateway does nothing to locate them.
Cyera's agentless scanning and Browser Shield were built for exactly this environment, at a price a four-person startup was never going to pay anyway.
The strongest objection to both: a team could scope each agent's OAuth key narrowly at the provider itself, granting read-only Gmail access or a single GitHub repository, and skip paying for a broker entirely. For one service, that objection holds.
It stops working the moment an agent touches more than one service, forcing a choice between hand-rolled policy code for every new integration or broad standing scopes granted "just in case," which is the exact credential sprawl Clawvisor exists to prevent. It also answers nothing about Cyera's question. A narrowly scoped key says nothing about where an organization's sensitive data already sits before any agent goes near it.
Moving off either tool is cheap in a way enterprise security software rarely is. Clawvisor's self-hosted deployment runs in a Docker container, so removing it means stopping the container and rotating the credentials it held. That is the entire exit process.
Leaving Cyera costs more, mostly in organizational terms. Cyera's classification and lineage data built up over months of scanning does not travel to a competitor, and a team that leaves loses the audit trail Data Lineage built for every file an agent touched.
Running both is more common than picking one. A security lead evaluating Cyera for a compliance mandate is very likely also running agents against Slack or GitHub somewhere in the same company, and Cyera's own product does not close that gap. HiddenLayer's runtime scanning covers a third gap neither vendor touches. Clawvisor's zero-dollar entry price makes stacking it underneath a Cyera deployment close to free, which is the actual argument for treating this as a "both" decision rather than an "either" one.
Clawvisor's team-of-one status means the open-source project could stall as easily as it could raise a seed round or get acquired outright, and either outcome would change this comparison faster than a feature update would.
Cyera closed its last funding round five months after the one before it, at a valuation that doubled in that stretch, while telling TechCrunch it is still spending faster than it earns. Watch which of those two trajectories bends first. That answer will date this article faster than anything else in it.
Not really. Clawvisor brokers credentials so an AI agent never holds a raw API key, while Cyera discovers and classifies sensitive data across an organization's systems. A company can need one, the other, or both, depending on which risk it is trying to close.
The self-hosted version is free and open source, built on a Go backend with a React frontend, and the hosted cloud trial needs no credit card. An enterprise plan with single sign-on and private deployment exists, but Clawvisor has not published its price anywhere the public can check.
Cyera does not publish rates and requires a sales conversation before any number appears. Market estimates place the cost around $2,000 per terabyte scanned, with engagements typically starting near $50,000 a year, though Cyera itself has not confirmed either figure.
Yes, and many security teams effectively already do, since the two tools solve different problems. A company running Cyera for data classification can add Clawvisor underneath, at close to zero marginal cost, to close the separate gap of agent credential exposure.
Clawvisor's own GitHub documentation says the software has not been audited for security and should not be a team's only safeguard for sensitive systems. Its founder is currently the project's sole listed contributor, according to its Y Combinator profile, a real continuity risk for anyone depending on it beyond testing.
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