Ashwin Ramachandran

Ashwin Ramachandran
Occupation	Technology entrepreneur
Known for	Founder of ContextFort

Ashwin Ramachandran is a technology entrepreneur and the founder of ContextFort, a cybersecurity company that provides OS-level telemetry and visibility tools for AI coding agents. ContextFort is a participant in Y Combinator's Summer 2025 batch As of 2025 06 and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Ramachandran is listed as the sole founder of the company in Y Combinator's directory.

Career

Ramachandran founded ContextFort to address a security gap created by the growing adoption of AI coding agents such as Cursor and Claude Code in software development environments. When engineers use these AI agents, the agents typically inherit the user's full system permissions, gaining access to files, credentials, environment variables, network connections, and shell execution capabilities. ContextFort was built to give security teams visibility into and control over what these agents access and execute on engineers' machines.

The company's core product provides independent, OS-level monitoring of AI agent activity. Rather than relying on agent self-reported logs, ContextFort monitors from the operating system kernel using technologies such as eBPF on Linux, the Endpoint Security Framework on macOS, and ETW with Minifilter on Windows. This approach allows the tool to record every file touched, network connection made, and process spawned by an AI coding agent, creating a complete audit trail of agent actions independent of any data the agent itself reports.

ContextFort distinguishes its approach from traditional endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools such as CrowdStrike. While EDR solutions are designed to detect malware and known threats — that is, to determine whether a given process is malicious — ContextFort is designed to answer a different question: what did the AI agent actually access and do? The company positions this as a fundamentally distinct security requirement that existing tools do not address, given that AI coding agents may be entirely legitimate software while still exfiltrating sensitive credentials or accessing files outside the intended scope of a given task.

In addition to monitoring AI coding agents on endpoints, ContextFort has developed capabilities for AI browser agents. The company offers a Chrome extension that detects when an AI agent takes control of a browser, records every action during the session — including pages visited, clicks, and text entry — and provides controls to prevent risky actions and cross-site data leakage.

Y Combinator, which accepted ContextFort into its Summer 2025 batch, is one of the most selective startup accelerators in the world, with an acceptance rate typically below two percent. Participation in a Y Combinator batch generally includes seed funding and access to the accelerator's network of founders and investors.