# Why we built Avispa URL: https://avispa.ai/blog/why-we-built-avispa/ [Blog](https://avispa.ai/blog/) Avispa began with AI agents working alongside our own teams. Here is what we learned and why we are bringing it to our customers. ![Victor Piñeiro, Founder and CEO](https://avispa.ai/assets/people/victor-144-d6d3122440.avif) By Victor Piñeiro · 6 minute read ## We Built It for Our Own Teams First Avispa didn’t start as a product. It started as an answer to a problem inside our own business and for the customers we serve. Our teams were stretched thin. Platform engineers split their days between building and firefighting. Security analysts were buried in alerts. The people delivering for clients were the same people writing proposals and answering security questionnaires. The work was growing faster than we could hire for it. So we put AI agents to work in our own business first. This is what we learned, and why we’re now bringing it to our customers. ### Starting with platform engineering Our platform engineering team was the natural place to start. Their work never stops: service requests, failed pipelines, patching, configuration drift and documentation that never quite keeps up. All of it is critical, and much of it is repetitive. We gave the team a group of AI agents to work alongside them. The agents pick up incoming requests from our workflow tools, investigate failed pipeline runs and propose a fix, prepare infrastructure changes as pull requests for review, and update runbooks as the environment changes. The engineers review, decide and approve. They no longer start every task from a blank page. The difference was dramatic. The backlog that used to roll from one sprint to the next started to shrink, and our engineers got time back for the design and architecture work that needs their judgment. Once other teams saw it, the same approach spread to security operations and client delivery. Speed was only half the job, though. ## Fast and Secure Aren’t a Trade-Off Most AI agents make you choose between moving fast and staying secure. Our work never gave us that choice. Our teams secure federal agencies and critical infrastructure, where threats don’t wait for a change window and one compromised account can reach systems people depend on every day. Those environments need speed as much as anyone. They can’t afford to get it by handing an agent the keys and hoping. So we built security into every agent from the start: - **Agent identity.** Every agent has its own identity and short-lived credentials scoped to its task. - **Zero Trust access.** Agents reach only approved hosts and use only the tools they’re granted. - **Built-in protection.** Prompt injection defense, data loss protection and sandboxed execution. - **Human approval.** Nothing changes until a person says yes, unless you decide otherwise. - **Continuous monitoring.** Dedicated SOC agents watch agent activity, continuously validate controls and give every agent a risk score based on its configuration, detections and behavior. - **Full record and budgets.** Every run, action and cost is logged, and agents pause at their spending limits. - **Your environment.** Runs on local LLMs, in your cloud, on an on-premises appliance or fully air-gapped. Under the hood, Avispa Enterprise is built against the frameworks critical infrastructure already relies on: NIST SP 800-53, NIST’s Zero Trust Architecture and CISA’s Cybersecurity Performance Goals, plus the OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications for risks specific to agents. The result is agents that move as fast as your teams need, with security your CISO doesn’t have to lose sleep over. ## Now we’re bringing it to our customers The organizations we serve look a lot like we did: talented teams, too much work, and a security team being asked to approve AI it can’t see into. Along the way, we learned that the hardest problems aren’t all technical. People need AI they can use without becoming experts. Teams need agents that work together, not tucked away in one person’s chat window. And security teams need to be able to say yes with confidence. Avispa Enterprise is an agentic workforce built around those needs, with three commitments: **AI for everyone.** Agents work where your people already work: Teams, Slack, email, ServiceNow and 100+ integrations. There’s no new tool to learn and no expertise required. **Built for collaboration.** Agents work alongside your people. They record what they do and learn so knowledge is shared across the team, and they bring the decisions that matter to a person. **The most secure AI agents available.** That’s our goal, and it’s the same standard we hold our own environment to. ## See how we work We’re still learning from every team we talk to, and we’d rather show you than tell you. Book a demo and ask the hard questions. We’ll walk you through how our own teams work with agents, and how the same approach can serve any team in your organization. ## Read next - [Avispa Enterprise](https://avispa.ai/enterprise/) - [Security and trust](https://avispa.ai/security/) - [About us](https://avispa.ai/about/) - [Book a demo](https://avispa.ai/book-a-demo/) [All posts](https://avispa.ai/blog/) · [Next: What elite SOCs have in common, and why we built OrbitSOC around it](https://avispa.ai/blog/what-elite-socs-have-in-common/) ## See it on your own use case. [Book a demo](https://avispa.ai/book-a-demo/) · [Watch it work](https://avispa.ai/#watch)