Why We Backed Asymptote Labs
Asymptote is building the AI runtime infrastructure layer for a world of infinite agents
Dylan Itzikowitz ยท October 20, 2026
We're heading toward a world where every enterprise has millions of AI agents working across its business, but little infrastructure to understand or control what they're doing.
These agents are already writing code, accessing sensitive data, and taking actions across critical systems. Yet their activity remains fragmented across tools and environments. Just as cloud computing created the need for an entirely new observability and security stack, autonomous agents will require runtime visibility and control built for a world where agents vastly outnumber the humans overseeing them.
That's what Asymptote Labs is building.
We first met Justin D'Souza and Shukan Shah through the South Park Commons Founder Fellowship, though in many ways their story at SPC started years earlier. Both came from Doppel, one of our breakout portfolio companies, whose founders had also gone through the Fellowship. At Doppel, Justin and Shukan built the core social engineering detection systems that processed billions of data points across internet infrastructure. They'd spent more than seven years building together across multiple startups.
Having seen Doppel's journey from its earliest days, it was especially exciting to see Justin and Shukan emerge from that same team to build a company of their own.
Justin and Shukan entered the Fellowship knowing they wanted to build in cybersecurity, but still figuring out exactly which problem to tackle.
Their first direction was application security for AI-generated code. They built a product, got it into customer pilots, and spent months working closely with security teams. But the more they learned, the more they saw a bigger problem emerging. Enterprises were deploying coding agents across their organizations, yet nobody had a complete picture of what those agents were doing. Activity was scattered across harnesses, machines, and environments, making it difficult to investigate failures, detect risks, or understand how AI was being used.
That realization changed the direction of Asymptote. Justin and Shukan saw that the same runtime data needed to secure AI agents could also help engineering teams improve reliability, businesses understand AI spending, and eventually make agents themselves more capable. The opportunity was considerably larger than the one they'd started with.
Within weeks, they'd built and released Beacon, an open-source telemetry layer that captures and normalizes activity across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and more than 20 other agent harnesses. Beacon gives organizations a shared view of agent behavior while allowing developers to preserve context and learnings across coding sessions. That common runtime data layer is now the foundation for Asymptote's enterprise platform, which provides centralized visibility, security detection, real-time policy enforcement, and governance.
Since launching in May 2026, Beacon has seen remarkable developer adoption. GitHub stars grew more than 460% in September alone, and the project reached #3 among GitHub's global trending repositories. That momentum is translating into enterprise demand, with organizations already deploying Beacon and Asymptote's platform in production.
What has stayed with us throughout this journey is how little Justin and Shukan's pace has changed, even as their direction has. We've watched their understanding of the market deepen, their ambitions grow, and their ability to execute keep pace with both.
The opportunity ahead is enormous. As enterprises move toward a world of millions of autonomous agents, the runtime data they generate will become essential to understanding, securing, and improving how those agents operate. What began as a focused cybersecurity idea has grown into a vision for an entirely new layer of enterprise infrastructure. We've had a front-row seat as Justin and Shukan have brought that vision to life, and we're excited to see how much further they take it.
We're proud to have backed Justin and Shukan through the SPC Founder Fellowship and to continue supporting Asymptote alongside Tower Research Ventures, Lytical Ventures, and 1984 Ventures in their oversubscribed $5.5M seed round.
Asymptote is hiring, and you can explore Beacon on GitHub. Reach the team at [email protected].
