YC S26 · Company Brain

Your company brain is confidently wrong.

Every AI agent you deploy runs on scattered, contradictory, out-of-date company knowledge. Cognova reconciles it, scores it, tests it against what your company actually does — and blocks agents from executing anything unverified.

Book a verification audit See how it works

Not a wiki. Not RAG. A truth-maintenance system for the age of autonomous agents.

cognova · refund workflow

agent> Customer requests a $420 refund, 38 days after purchase. Approve autonomously?

@reconciler Found 3 sources for refund.standard_approval — wiki (30d), support DM (45d for VIP), Finance override. contradicted

@authority Resolved owner: Head of Support. Authoritative version = 45d for VIP tier only. Customer is non-VIP. unverified

@verifier Tested against last 500 refunds. Non-VIP past 30d auto-approved in 0% of cases. Assertion fails. reality checked

@gate Confidence 41/100, below money-movement threshold (98). Autonomous execution blocked. blocked

✓ Agent stopped. Routed to Head of Support for sign-off. Wrong autonomous refund prevented.

Ask Cognova about a workflow… refunds KYC exceptions

The Problem

Aggregating knowledge isn't the hard part. The industry is racing to pull your knowledge into one place — but most of that knowledge is contradictory, stale, and just plain wrong.

The refund

The wiki says refunds are 30 days. Your support lead has quietly done 45 for VIPs since 2023. Finance overrode both last quarter. Which one does your agent follow?

3 sources disagree

The incident

Three Slack threads describe your incident-response process. Two contradict each other. The one your team actually follows was a DM that never got written down.

owner unknown

The pricing exception

The pricing-exception doc was written by someone who left. Nobody knows if it's still true. Your agent doesn't know either — so it acts like it is.

stale · 14 mo

A knowledge graph faithfully captures all three contradictory versions and hands them to your agent. The agent then confidently does the wrong thing. That's not a retrieval problem. That's a verification problem.

The Cost

A wrong answer that looks right is the most expensive answer there is.

$12.9M

Average annual cost of poor data quality per organization.

SOURCE — GARTNER

15–25%

Of revenue lost to bad data at a typical company.

SOURCE — MIT SLOAN

Accuracy of raw enterprise data on schema-intensive questions before a verified layer is added.

SOURCE — DATA.WORLD AI LAB

From scattered knowledge to verified, executable skills.

Four layers. The first is table stakes. The other three are why agents can finally be trusted to act.

Book a verification audit

reconcile.refund_approvalcontradicted

wiki_2023≤ 30 days

support_dm≤ 45 days (vip)

finance_overridemanual only

resolved_ownerhead_of_support

Reconcile & score

Cognova detects contradictions across sources, identifies the authoritative owner, flags staleness, and assigns a live confidence score. Anything low goes to a human — not an agent.

verify · assertionsrunning

sample_size500 refunds

days_since ≤ 3078% pass

amount ≤ $50096% pass

Verify against reality

Each skill carries executable assertions — like unit tests. Cognova runs them against your live data on a schedule. A skill that says it's current isn't the same as one that is.

serve · agent apigated

skill_versionv14 · signed

confidence41 / 100

threshold98 (money)

decisionexecution blocked

Serve, gate & log

Agents pull skills through a governed API or MCP server — each response carries confidence, source, and a hard execution gate. Every action is logged against the exact skill version used.

Everything agents need to act safely. Nothing they can act on unsafely.

The verification layer sits between your knowledge and your agents — as the checkpoint every action passes through.

See the platform

connectors · synclive

slacksynced 2m ago

zendesksynced 4m ago

postgres · prodread-only

skills extracted1,284

Universal ingestion

Continuous, read-only sync from Slack, email, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Salesforce, Zendesk, transcripts, and your warehouse. Cognova extracts named skills, not a pile of text.

resolution queue3 pending

pricing.exceptionstale 14mo

incident.sev12 sources clash

recommenduse v9 (ops lead)

action1-click resolve

Human resolution workflow

Every contradiction, stale skill, and failed assertion is routed to its real owner with a recommended fix and one-click resolution. The brain gets more correct every week.

audit trailimmutable

agent_actionrefund #4821

skill_usedv14 · conf 41

outcomeblocked → human

exportregulator-ready

Full audit trail

Every agent action is logged against the skill version it used — exportable, immutable, regulator-ready. When someone asks why the agent did that, you have the answer.

Capabilities

Four things every company brain needs — and only one of them is storage.

01 · Reconciliation

Contradiction detection

Automatically finds where your sources disagree and shows them side by side — the single most common reason agents fail in production.

02 · Scoring

Confidence scoring

A live 0–100 score on every skill from source agreement, authority, recency, and reality-match — so you always know what agents can be trusted with.

03 · Verification

Reality verification

Executable assertions test each skill against your real transactional data on a schedule. Company knowledge with a test suite that fails loud.

04 · Governance

Execution gating

Set thresholds per skill or risk-tier. Cognova blocks agents from executing anything below the bar and routes it to a human for sign-off.

Founder

Archit Shanbhag

FOUNDER · COGNOVA

The model was never the problem. The knowledge it runs on is.

Cognova comes out of a simple observation: the models got good enough two years ago, and the automation still didn't come. The bottleneck moved from how smart the model is to how true the knowledge is — and nobody was building the layer that decides whether an agent can be trusted to act.

Archit is building Cognova as the verification and governance checkpoint that sits between a company's knowledge and its agents — reconciling what's contradictory, testing what's claimed against what's real, and refusing to let agents act on anything that can't be stood behind.

"In a world where agents can act, the difference between looks right and is right is the whole product."

founder@cognova.cloud LinkedIn

Trust & Data

Your data never leaves your boundary without your say-so.

Cognova connects read-only by default with scoped permissions, and never mutates a source. For regulated operations, deploy inside your own cloud, VPC, or on-prem — so the knowledge Cognova verifies stays exactly where your compliance team wants it.

Read-only by default Scoped RBAC VPC / On-prem Tenant isolation Immutable audit log SOC 2 · in progress

Book a verification audit Read the technical overview

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Find out what your agents are getting wrong.