Keycard Labs Inc., a startup that helps enterprises manage their artificial intelligence agents’ access to internal systems, launched today with $38 million from investors.
The company raised the capital over two rounds. The initial $8 seed raise was led by Andreessen Horowitz and boldstart, while Acrew Capital led the subsequent $30 million Series A investment. Keycard is also backed by executives at AI chip startup Groq Inc., Datadog Inc. and other prominent tech firms.
Companies usually regulate access to their applications by assigning employees a set of permissions that specify what workloads and data they can use. According to Keycard, that approach isn’t effective for AI agents. If a company gives an agent access to an application with the goal of automating a certain business task, the agent might perform an entirely different task.
Keycard has built an access management platform that promises to address the challenge. According to the company, its software enables developers to implement “per-task” access controls for AI agents. Those controls don’t give AI agents broad access to an application, but instead limit them to performing specific actions specified by developers.
In many cases, applications spin up an AI agent to perform a single task and then delete it. Often, the software environment the agent uses to perform the task is deleted as well. When that happens, the access permissions that were given to the agent to facilitate processing become obsolete. Keycard provides features that make it possible to quickly revoke access permissions when they’re no longer needed.
The platform records AI agents’ activity in a log designed to withstand tempering attempts. Furthermore, it provides information on which application or user created a given agent. Customers can store the cryptographic keys that Keycard uses to perform cybersecurity tasks in their public cloud environments or on on-premises hardware.
The company provides software development kits and an MCP integration that make it relatively simple to deploy its platform. According to Keycard, the platform can be integrated into AI agents without modifying their code. Additionally, organizations can connect it the other identity management platforms they use to manage application access.
Keycard will use its newly raised funding to extend its platform’s feature set. The company will hire more engineers to speed up the effort.
“Keycard provides the guardrails that allow agents to act safely on behalf of people and businesses, unlocking the true potential of the agent economy,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Ian Livingstone.
The company’s launch comes a few weeks after a fellow AI agent security startup, Scalekit Inc., raised $5.5 million in seed funding. Before an agent can perform a task in an application on users’ behalf, those users must give it permission to log into their accounts.
Scalekit reduces the amount of custom code needed to request access permission from users. Furthermore, its platform can add cybersecurity features to the MCP servers that an AI agent use to access third-party applications.
Image: Keycard
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