Open source control plane and MCP gateway for governing enterprise AI agents

Obot AI was founded in 2022 as Acorn Labs and renamed as it focused on the Model Context Protocol. The founding team previously built Rancher Labs, acquired by SUSE, and Cloud.com, acquired by Citrix, and includes chief executive Sheng Liang, president Shannon Williams, chief product officer Will Chan, and engineering lead Craig Jellick. That history shapes the approach: the platform is fully open source and self-hostable, on the same reasoning that drove Kubernetes management adoption, with a hosted cloud edition and a supported enterprise edition alongside a community edition for smaller deployments.

The gateway hosts and deploys MCP servers from a central registry, puts SSO and OIDC in front of them, and gives each team a single endpoint rather than a scattering of locally run processes. Policy controls constrain what actions an agent can take across its connected integrations, with role-based access control applied to users and groups and the ability to block behavior that falls outside the rules. Every tool call and model request is recorded in an exportable audit log, and discovery scanning surfaces unmanaged agents and unsanctioned MCP servers already in use. Token consumption is broken out by agent, user, and group for cost attribution. In 2025 the company raised a $35M seed round co-led by Mayfield Fund and Nexus Venture Partners to fund the gateway and its Nanobot agent framework.