Control plane for enterprise AI agents covering MCP access, identity, policy, and audit

Runlayer was founded in 2025 and is based in New York. The founding team is Andy Berman, previously co-founder of Nanit and of Vowel, which Zapier acquired, and later director of AI at Zapier; Tal Peretz, who led machine learning in the Israeli Air Force and built Zapier's MCP product; and Vitor Balocco, a former staff AI engineer at Zapier who speaks publicly on MCP vulnerabilities. The company emerged from stealth in November 2025 with an $11M seed round led by Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures and Felicis, and announced a $30M Series A in 2026. David Soria Parra, a co-creator of MCP at Anthropic, advises the company.

The product is positioned as a control plane rather than an MCP gateway, on the argument that a gateway handles one layer while the governance problem also requires a catalog, identity controls, reusable capabilities, observability, and agent workflows. In practice, Runlayer discovers AI usage that platform teams did not provision, including agents, MCP servers, skills, plugins, and client configuration files, then gives employees a sanctioned path: an approved MCP catalog, capabilities that can be reused across teams, and permissions derived from the existing identity provider rather than hand-built glue. Policy enforcement and a unified audit trail cover the resulting agent sessions. The stated aim is to remove the choice between blocking AI adoption and accepting ungoverned access.