Kai vs Claroty for plants that need IT and OT exposures fixed, not just found

Kai’s homepage says one deployment raised asset classification and ownership from 17% to 93% across 150,000 assets in under six hours, uncovering 30,000 shadow IT and OT assets. That is a vendor-reported customer outcome, not an audit. But it explains why a Claroty co-founder would build a second company: in her telling, finding OT assets is no longer the hard part.

Kai, founded by Claroty co-founder Galina Antova and SecurityMatters co-founder Damiano Bolzoni, sells an autonomous defense platform. Its agents gather context, validate exposures, auto-remediate or route findings, write detections, and push compensating EDR and SIEM rules. Claroty sells xDome as a SaaS cyber-physical systems platform and Continuous Threat Detection (CTD) on-premises. Both collect OT asset data through passive monitoring, Claroty Edge, safe queries, project file analysis, and enrichment, then add exposure management, network protection, secure access, and threat detection. Kai’s numbers and workflows come from its own site and are not independently demonstrated.

Buy Kai when IT and OT findings already exceed what the team can triage and the goal is autonomous validation, remediation, and new detections across both. Buy Claroty when the first requirement is deep, safe visibility and threat detection on industrial, medical, and building systems, with secure remote access.

Overview

	Kai	Claroty
Primary use case	Autonomous exposure validation, remediation, detection engineering, and asset intelligence across IT, OT, and application findings	Cyber-physical systems protection: OT, IoT, and medical asset visibility, exposure management, network protection, secure access, and threat detection
Day-to-day workflow	Set the boundary between autonomous action and human review, then let Kai agents triage findings, auto-remediate confirmed risk, and route the rest to Kai Assisted remediation	Review the xDome or CTD asset inventory and visibility score, work prioritized exposure and gap tasks, and investigate OT threat detections
Main buying consideration	No public pricing. Sold by demo and quote	AWS Marketplace lists xDome contracts per 12 months from USD 100,000 for Claroty Essential to USD 1,200,000 for Claroty Advanced, with custom private offers. CTD on-premises pricing is not public

We reviewed Kai’s homepage and its March 2026 launch coverage, plus Claroty’s passive monitoring and industrial cybersecurity pages, the April 2026 xDome Visibility Orchestration release, and the AWS Marketplace xDome listing, on 14 Oct 2026. We did not run either product.

Kai

Claroty

Editions and pricing

Claroty’s Marketplace tiers are scoped by bundle, and the listing does not define what one billing unit counts. Kai publishes no price.

	Kai	Claroty
How it is sold	One Autonomous Defense Platform with solutions for AI-enabled attacks and continuous threat exposure management	xDome SaaS tiers (Essential, Essential Plus, Enterprise, Advanced) or CTD on-premises
What the higher tier adds	Not confirmed in public documentation	Enterprise adds threat detection to XIoT visibility. Advanced adds secure access
Deployment	Not confirmed in public documentation	SaaS xDome or on-premises CTD for sites that keep data local

Asset visibility in OT

Both build an asset inventory that includes OT. The documented depth of collection differs between the two sources.

	Kai	Claroty
Collection	Automated analysis that classifies assets and identifies owners, including shadow IT and OT assets. Collection methods are not confirmed in public documentation	Passive monitoring, Claroty Edge, safe queries, project file analysis, and ecosystem enrichment
Protocol coverage	Not confirmed in public documentation	More than 450 protocols on the passive monitoring page
Gap handling	Asset classification and ownership enrichment run by agents	Visibility Orchestration scores visibility and assigns prioritized gap tasks

Remediation and detection

Both prioritize exposure. Kai’s stated difference is that its agents also take the remediation step.

	Kai	Claroty
Remediation	Auto-remediates confirmed risk and generates pull requests for application findings, within boundaries humans set	Prioritized exposure and gap tasks, with network protection and secure access controls. Autonomous remediation is not confirmed in public documentation
Detection	Writes and tunes detection rules and deploys compensating EDR and SIEM rules	OT threat detection with anomaly and known-threat alerts on cyber-physical networks
Scope beyond OT	Infrastructure, application security, and threat intelligence workstreams	Cyber-physical systems across industrial, healthcare, and commercial environments

Choose Kai when the backlog of validated IT and OT exposures is the bottleneck and you will let agents remediate and write detections within limits you set. Choose Claroty when you need documented passive and active OT collection across 450-plus protocols, an on-premises option, and secure access to cyber-physical systems.