Runlayer raises $30M Series A led by Felicis to govern enterprise AI agents
What's the deal? Runlayer, a startup building the infrastructure to govern how employees use AI agents, has raised a $30 million Series A led by Felicis, with Khosla Ventures participating.
Vinod Khosla wanted in big. When he heard Runlayer was raising, he said he wanted "to buy every available dollar of the round."
The round brings Runlayer's total capital to $42 million. It launched out of stealth just seven months ago with an $11 million seed from the same two investors.
Why now? Companies are deploying AI agents everywhere but lack a reliable way to see what those agents do, control their access, or stop them from going rogue.
One Runlayer customer found an agent had blown through its entire annual AI-compute budget in a single weekend, stuck in a loop.
Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will include AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. Agentic AI spending is on pace to hit $201.9 billion this year.
The product acts as a corporate app store and control room in one. Employees plug in any tool — ChatGPTDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, ClaudeDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, Salesforce's Agentforce — while IT teams get a dashboard showing what every agent is doing, what data it touched, and how much it cost.
It also surfaces "shadow AI" — tools employees use without company knowledge — a problem some reports put as high as 78% of enterprise AI users.
What could go wrong? The space is crowding fast. Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and identity giant Okta are all building agent governance tools.
Felicis general partner Jake Storm, who led both rounds, argues Runlayer is structurally different. "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," he said.
Storm also reframes governance itself. "A lot of people view governance as a tax. This is actually the unlock. It flips it totally on its head."
The signal: Runlayer is betting that the Model Context Protocol — the emerging standard for connecting AI agents to enterprise data and tools — becomes the chokepoint where governance must live, positioning its neutral control layer between the model providers it monitors. With Felicis preempting both the seed and Series A, and Khosla angling to take the whole round, the early-stage startup's backers are wagering that a cross-provider "Switzerland" play can outlast the bundled offerings from Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and Okta.
Read more: fortune.com
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
