KnowBe4 helps organisations reduce human risk: the chance that employees fall for phishing, social engineering or careless data handling.
It trains and tests the workforce, protects email and collaboration tools, and has extended the same approach to the AI agents now working inside company tenants.
At A Glance
| Vendor | KnowBe4 |
|---|---|
| Category | Human risk management, security awareness training, email security, AI agent security |
| Identities covered | Workforce users and AI agents |
| Deployment | Cloud platform |
| Agentic AI | AIDA agents in production, Agent Risk Manager in Technical Preview |
| Founded | 2010 |
| Market classification | Data Security |
What KnowBe4 Does
Most breaches still start with a person clicking, replying or sharing something they should not. KnowBe4 builds its platform around measuring that risk for each person and acting on it. Each employee gets a dynamic Risk Score built from hundreds of real-world indicators, and the score decides which training, simulated attacks and email controls that person receives. The KnowBe4 Platform applies the same model to AI agents, which it treats as a second population of identities to discover, monitor and control.
Products
Security Awareness Training
Security Awareness Training gives each employee personalised lessons and tests them with phishing and vishing simulations. Real-Time Coaching steps in at the moment a user does something risky, and Compliance Training handles mandatory courses with automated policy acknowledgement and reporting for audits. It is aimed at security and compliance teams that need behaviour change they can measure.
Email And Collaboration Security
This product line protects the inbox and chat channels where most social engineering lands.
| Defend | Inbound email and messaging security, built to complement Microsoft Defender |
|---|---|
| Prevent | Outbound email security that stops misdirected or sensitive messages leaving the organisation |
| PhishER Plus | Incident response automation that sorts user-reported messages and removes confirmed threats from every inbox |
AIDA (AI Defense Agents)
AIDA is a set of agents that use behaviour-based intelligence to spot risky actions and generate training and simulation content automatically, so awareness programmes keep pace without manual effort from administrators. An Orchestration Agent coordinates sub-agents for ongoing training, phishing and remedial training, while others generate templates, landing pages, policy quizzes, knowledge refreshers and deepfake training content.
Agent Risk Manager
Agent Risk Manager gives security teams real-time visibility of the AI agents running in their tenant, detects threats in what those agents do and lets teams step in to control them. It is for organisations that have adopted assistants and agents faster than they can govern them. It is currently in Technical Preview.
- Six detection engines: prompt injection, sensitive information, unbounded consumption, content safety, privilege escalation and agent overstepping
- An audit log, a Tool Network view of tools shared between agents, and user risk scoring
How It Works
The platform is delivered from the cloud and treats people and AI agents as two populations on one platform.
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Risk Score | A per-user score drawn from indicators across the customer’s security ecosystem, analysed by the SmartRisk Agent. |
| SmartRisk Engine | Ranks risk scores, picks target users and adjusts interventions automatically. |
| PhishML | An email classifier that learns from reports across the whole PhishER community. Users report suspicious mail with the Phish Alert Button, which feeds PhishER Plus. |
| Threat intelligence | KnowBe4 Threat Labs updates detection models from attack telemetry. |
| Agent connectors | Agent Risk Manager connects to agent providers through guided onboarding, then intercepts agent tool executions and user interactions and can alert or block. |
Identities And Systems Covered
| Workforce users | Employees measured through the Risk Score, trained, tested in simulations and coached at the point of risk |
|---|---|
| AI agents | Treated as non-human identities, with zero-configuration discovery of every agent in the tenant, including unsanctioned tools |
| Agent providers | Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude |
| Email and collaboration | Microsoft 365, Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams |
Company Background
| Founded | August 2010 by Stu Sjouwerman, now Executive Chairman |
|---|---|
| Leadership | Bryan Palma, President and CEO since May 2025 |
| Ownership | Listed in 2021, then taken private by Vista Equity Partners in February 2023 |
| Scale | More than 70,000 reported customer organisations |
| Acquisitions | Egress (July 2024), MediaPRO (2021), Securable.io and The Security Awareness Company (2017), Popcorn Training and exploqii (2018), El Pescador and Twist and Shout Group (2019) |
| Recognition | Included in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security |
Note: This overview is compiled from KnowBe4’s publicly available information as of 3 November 2026. It is provided for information only. NHI Mgmt Group does not endorse any vendor, and nothing on this page represents the opinions of NHI Mgmt Group.