ABout
An agent with a finance integration attempts a $50,000 wire that nobody approved.
What happens in the next 200 milliseconds is the whole question. Either the action completes and is logged — a record of a failure — or it is held and returned to the person whose authority the agent was using, for them to decide with proof they were there.
APERION builds the second outcome.
Enterprise AI has an identity problem that looks like a security problem. An agent acts on authority delegated by a person, but nothing in the stack binds the action back to that person, checks it against what they are actually entitled to do, or produces evidence afterwards that stands up to examination.
Smartflow is the enforcement point. It runs on-premises or in your own cloud tenancy, sits inline between your applications and your models, and applies policy to every prompt, response and tool call at the moment it happens — not in a report afterwards.
Governing an AI agent takes four layers, and no single vendor should own all four.
Verified identity proves the human. Access governance scopes their authority — and composes with the Okta, Entra or Ping you already run rather than replacing it. Runtime governance holds the agent to that authority and sends the action back when it exceeds it. Audit and evidence proves the human decided.
APERION builds the third and fourth. We integrate with the first two.
APERION comes from ἄπειρον — apeiron — the word Anaximander used in Miletus around 580 BCE for the boundless: the infinite source from which everything originates, dependent on nothing, enabling everything. It is built from ἀ- ("without") and πεῖραρ ("fence, limit, boundary").
The name was there before we were. It is the foundation.
Before your applications, before your models, before the architectural decisions you have not made yet — something has to be underneath. Everything runs through it. It answers to you and to nothing else.
Anaximander's boundless was not chaos. It was the principle that held everything and gave it order. Boundless capability, bounded by your rules.
The thesis predates the company: AI traffic is network traffic, and network traffic has always needed a control plane. Every prior wave of enterprise computing produced one — for packets, for identity, for APIs. Inference did not get one, and enterprises are now discovering what that costs.
Craig Alberino — Co-Founder and CEO. Previously founded Grey Jean Technologies, ALTA AI Partners/ NYU AI Accelerator. Earlier at Accenture and IBM.
Scott Ancheta — Co-Founder and CTO. Former Field CTO at Cisco for General Motors. Gates every technical claim APERION publishes.
Tamara Franklin — Board Advisor. Former Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Marsh. Former Chief Data Officer at IBM.
APERION Shield is Apache 2.0 — Rust middleware that puts guardrails on MCP tool calls. It is the front door, not a trial: run it, read it, fork it. Teams that need identity binding, policy enforcement and examination-ready evidence on top of it upgrade to Smartflow.
Advisory, then a proof of concept, then commercial. A forward-deployed engineering team embeds with yours, finds the workload where the governance gap is already costing something, and puts one governed workflow into production in under 90 days.
APERION is an NVIDIA Inception member and a capstone partner with Clemson University.
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