ASGUARD Selected for Rice Business Plan Competition 2026 — Top 42 of 600+ Teams

The Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC) is the world's richest and largest graduate-level student startup competition, hosted annually by Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business. This year, over 600 teams from universities across 30+ countries applied. ASGUARD was selected alongside teams from Stanford, MIT, Cambridge, and other top institutions — validating the urgency of AI agent security as a category.

Our pitch focused on the core problem: as enterprises deploy autonomous AI agents with access to internal systems, APIs, and sensitive data, traditional security tools fail to protect against prompt injection, data exfiltration, and agent hijacking. ASGUARD's real-time defense layer sits between agents and external inputs, filtering adversarial content in under 50 milliseconds. The judges recognized this as a necessary layer in the emerging AI infrastructure stack.

Competing at RBPC places ASGUARD in front of 300+ investors and corporate partners. Past RBPC alumni have collectively raised over $4 billion in funding. For our team, this is both a validation of our approach and an accelerant for our go-to-market in both the US and Japan. We're building the security standard for the agent economy — and this is a milestone on that path.