When longtime tech investor Vinod Khosla heard that Runlayer—the startup trying to become the default infrastructure layer governing how every corporate employee interacts with AI agents—was raising a new round, his response was unambiguous: he wanted “to buy every available dollar of the round.” Now, that conviction is official.
Runlayer raised a $30 million Series A led by Felicis, with Khosla Ventures participating, Fortune learned exclusively. Felicis preempted the round which brought Runlayer’s total capital raised to $42 million.
The startup, which launched out of stealth just seven months ago with an $11 million seed from the same two investors, is tackling one of enterprise tech’s most pressing problems. Companies are deploying AI agents everywhere, but no one has a reliable way to see what those agents are doing, control what they access, or stop them from going rogue. Last year, one of Runlayer’s customers discovered that an agent had blown through its entire annual AI-compute budget in a single weekend, running in a loop.
Runlayer is essentially a corporate app store and control room rolled into one. Employees can plug in any AI tool—OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Salesforce’s Agentforce, custom-built agents—and get a pre-approved way to use them, with company data already connected and guardrails already set. IT and security teams, meanwhile, get a single dashboard showing exactly what every AI agent in the organization is doing, what data it touched, and how much it cost. The platform also surfaces “shadow AI“—tools employees are using without their company’s knowledge—a problem some reports suggest could be as high as 78% of enterprise AI users.
“Every employee will delegate their work to swarms of agents. Not as a novelty, and not as a side tool, but as a core part of how work gets done.” CEO Andrew Berman told Fortune.
Berman, a three-time founder, previously cofounded Nanit—the AI-powered baby monitor that as of 2024 was doing an estimated $100 million-plus in revenue—and Vowel, an AI video conferencing platform that raised $17.8 million before being acquired by Zapier in 2023. He then served as Zapier’s director of AI, working directly with teams at OpenAI and Anthropic.
He founded Runlayer 10-and-a-half months ago. “I signed my term sheet the day I had my first child. I think I was in the hospital. We just kept seeing so much enterprise pull, and every company struggling with the same problem,” he said.
Since then, Runlayer has signed more than 12 unicorn customers—including Instacart, Gusto, Opendoor, dbt Labs, and AngelList—and expanded into financial services, where a Fortune 500 bank is now using Runlayer to monitor more than 100,000 employees’ AI activity across 200,000 devices. Half of Gusto’s company uses the product daily.
Runlayer’s timing isn’t incidental. Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will include AI agents by year-end 2026—up from less than 5% in 2025—and agentic AI spending is on pace to hit $201.9 billion this year.
The agentic AI security market alone is valued at $55 billion in 2026, projected to reach $888 billion by 2035. The space is getting crowded—Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and identity giant Okta are all building agent governance capabilities. Felicis GP Jake Storm, who led both rounds, isn’t dismissing the competition, and is instead reframing it. “A lot of people view governance as a tax,” Storm told Fortune. “This is actually the unlock. It flips it totally on its head.”
He sees Runlayer as structurally different from the encroaching incumbents: “This is a Switzerland business. No platform can own this—a neutral, cross-provider control layer is absolutely critical if we actually believe in the future of agents performing work.”
Berman won’t disclose revenue figures, but says the company is nine months ahead of the product roadmap it presented to investors at seed and has expanded from an MCP—a relatively new open standard that lets AI agents plug into external tools and data—focused product into a full interoperability layer spanning agents, plugins, and skills across the enterprise stack.
“You need a single pane of glass that watches everything, controls and has visibility into everything that’s going on,” Berman said. “Who watches the watchman? That’s what we do.”
