Autonomy needs
accountability
govern.sh exists so that software can act on its own without anyone losing sleep — every agent known, every permission scoped, every action provable. We're building the trust layer for autonomous software.
Softwareisbecominganactor—itbuys,refunds,deploys,andspeaksforthecompaniesthatrunit.Actorsneedidentitypapers.Webuildthepassport,thebordercheckpoint,andtherecordofentry,sothepeopleresponsibleforthesesystemscangrantrealautonomyandstillanswerforeveryactiontakenintheirname.
Started by the people who held the keys
govern.sh was founded in 2024 by infrastructure and security engineers who watched agents ship to production with god-mode API keys — and decided the missing primitive was worth building properly.
The god-mode key problem
Working across infrastructure and security teams, our founders keep seeing the same thing: production agents shipping with unscoped, shared API keys — full access, no attribution, no paper trail. The gap isn't better models. It's identity.
govern.sh is founded
A team of infrastructure and security engineers starts building the primitive that's missing: a per-agent cryptographic passport, with permissions and audit designed in from the first commit rather than bolted on after the incident.
First passports in production
Design partners in payments and support mint the first Agent Passports. Ed25519 identity per agent, revocable in one click — and for the first time, their audit logs name the actual actor.
Policies, budgets, and approvals ship
Scoped permissions become enforceable policy with spend caps and human-in-the-loop holds. The signed, hash-chained receipt format stabilizes, and the open-source verifier lets auditors check the record independently.
The Policy Enforcement Point launches
Real-time enforcement goes GA: every agent action checked against policy at the gate, with sub-10ms median decisions. Governance moves from reviewing what agents did to deciding what they may do — before it happens.
What we hold ourselves to
The same properties we build into the platform — verifiability, least privilege, speed, honest failure modes — are how we run the company.
Proof over promises
We don't ask anyone to trust us — not even our customers' auditors. Every claim the platform makes is backed by a signature someone else can verify. Internally it's the same: decisions ship with evidence, not adjectives.
Least privilege, always
Deny-by-default isn't just how the policy engine works — it's how we design. Every scope, every credential, every internal system starts from zero access and earns each grant with a written reason.
Speed is safety
A control that slows teams down gets bypassed, and a bypassed control is worse than none. We hold ourselves to the same bar we hold the enforcement point: if governance shows up in a flame graph, it's a bug.
Own the failure modes
We sit in the hot path of other people's production systems, so we name our failure modes out loud — in docs, in postmortems, in sales calls. Fail closed, degrade predictably, and never let marketing write the reliability story.
Operating principles
A small team sitting in the hot path of other people's production systems needs unusual discipline about how it decides, ships, and owns mistakes.
Significant decisions start as short written proposals with the tradeoffs stated plainly. Meetings resolve disagreement; they don't replace thinking.
Nothing lands on the enforcement path without a latency budget, a fail-closed story, and a rollback plan. Everything else in the company can move fast because this one thing doesn't.
We hire people who can hold an entire system in their head and give them real ownership. Fewer, more senior people beats a large org chart — the same least-privilege logic, applied to headcount.
Our best product decisions came from risk officers and auditors — the people paid to say no. We seek them out early and treat their objections as requirements, not friction.
Build the trust layer with us
We're a small, senior, mostly-remote team working on infrastructure that other companies bet their audits on. If that sentence reads as a feature, we'd like to meet you.
Don't see your role? Tell us what you'd own at careers@govern.sh
Talk to a human
Sales questions, support requests, or a security disclosure — every inbox below reaches the people who can actually act on it.
Looking for our security architecture and disclosure policy? Read the security overview.
See what accountable autonomy feels like.
Mint your first agent passport in under five minutes — free for your first three agents, no credit card required.