Neal is a serial founder and product leader with deep expertise in AI security. Prior to founding Manifold, Neal was the co-creator of LLM Guard, and co-founder of Laiyer AI, acquired by Protect AI, later acquired by Palo Alto Networks.

While securing Fortune 500 AI deployments at scale, Neal identified a fundamental limitation: as organizations moved from chatbots to autonomous agents, first-generation AI security tools, focused on LLM inference, proved incapable of detecting threats at the point of execution: where agents orchestrate, invoke tools, and take action. Today, that's largely coding agents on developer laptops. Tomorrow, autonomous agents on every employee's device.

Recognizing the urgency, Neal co-founded Manifold with Oleksandr Yaremchuk and Michael McKenna to build the first AI Detection and Response platform purpose-built for the agentic enterprise.