Why We Backed Asymptote Labs: You Can’t Secure What You Can’t See

Lucas Nelson, Managing Partner at Lytical Ventures · October 20, 2026

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We're about to give thousands of AI agents access to our code, infrastructure, and business processes. Some of them will have more privileges than the employees they're supposedly helping.

And we have remarkably little idea what they're actually doing.

What could go wrong?

The cybersecurity industry is already racing to sell solutions for agent security. But there's a fairly fundamental issue with that strategy: you can't secure what you can't see. And right now, visibility into agent activity is scattered across an ever-growing collection of tools, frameworks, and logs.

That's why we invested in Asymptote Labs.

At Lytical, we've spent a lot of time investing in open-source security companies. Graylog and Truffle Security are two examples. One thing we've learned is that getting developers to adopt your technology voluntarily is a pretty good indication that you're solving a real problem.

It doesn't guarantee you'll build a successful enterprise software business. Plenty of popular open-source projects never figure out how to make money. But when you combine genuine developer adoption with a problem that enterprises eventually have to solve, things can get interesting. That's the opportunity we see with Asymptote.

What stood out to us from the beginning was the team behind it.

Justin D'Souza and Shukan Shah have been building together for more than seven years. Most recently, they were early engineers at Doppel, where they helped build detection infrastructure operating at internet scale. That gives them relevant experience for what they're attempting now.

Collecting telemetry is relatively straightforward. Collecting enormous volumes of useful telemetry, making sense of it, and doing something actionable with it in real time is a much more difficult problem. This team has experience building systems that tackle similar challenges.

What impressed us just as much was their approach to the problem.

Justin and Shukan understood that before enterprises can secure AI agents, they first need a reliable way to see what those agents are doing. Today, that activity is fragmented across dozens of tools, each producing its own logs and data. Security teams are left piecing together information across systems, often without a complete picture. Rather than build another security product on top of that fragmented data, Justin and Shukan decided to solve the underlying problem.

Beacon is an open-source telemetry layer that captures and normalizes activity across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and more than 20 other agent harnesses. Instead of requiring security teams to understand every individual agent framework, it gives them a common way to observe what agents are actually doing.

Asymptote then builds its enterprise security platform on top of that telemetry, with capabilities for threat detection, real-time policy enforcement, and governance.

In other words, Beacon makes agent activity observable. Asymptote makes that information actionable.

Since launching in May 2026, Beacon was named one of Help Net Security's hottest open-source cybersecurity tools of June 2026 and reached No. 3 on GitHub's global trending repositories in September. 

GitHub popularity isn't revenue, but it's a pretty good indication that developers are paying attention. The real test is whether that enthusiasm translates into enterprise adoption.

Then there’s the bigger play.

We initially looked at Asymptote through a cybersecurity lens. That's our business, after all. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that security might just be the initial application.

The same telemetry that tells security teams whether an agent is doing something dangerous can tell engineering teams why an agent failed, finance teams where their AI budget is disappearing, or developers how to make an agent more effective.

Before agents can become a meaningful part of how enterprises operate, somebody needs to build the infrastructure that tells us what they're actually doing.

We think that will become a very large business.

We're proud to join Tower Research Ventures, 1984 Ventures, and South Park Commons in Asymptote Labs' oversubscribed $5.5 million seed round.

Asymptote is hiring. Check out Beacon on GitHub or get in touch with the founders at founders@asymptotelabs.ai.