New York-based startup Runlayer has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round to help enterprises deploy AI agents safely at scale — a problem that is quickly becoming one of the most pressing challenges in corporate technology today.
The round was led by Felicis, with participation from Khosla Ventures, bringing Runlayer’s total capital raised to $42 million. Felicis preempted the round — a strong signal of investor conviction — after having also led the company’s $11 million seed round when Runlayer emerged from stealth in November 2025.
The funding will be used to expand Runlayer’s engineering and go-to-market teams.
What Runlayer Does
Runlayer positions itself as the control layer for enterprise AI — a single platform that gives every employee a governed, sanctioned path to using AI agents across their daily workflows, while giving IT and security teams full visibility into what those agents are doing.
The platform supports the five to twenty AI clients a typical enterprise operates today, including IDEs, chat clients like ChatGPT and Claude, vertical AI applications, and platforms like Salesforce Agentforce. Employees can describe a task in plain language and instantly get a pre-approved AI agent — with the right tools, permissions, and company data already connected — ready to work across systems like CRM, Atlassian, Notion, and data warehouses.
On the security side, Runlayer’s platform blocks prompt injections, tool poisoning, data exfiltration, output manipulation, and intent drift in real time. A feature called Runlayer Watch surfaces “shadow AI” — tools employees are already using without company approval — and routes them toward sanctioned alternatives rather than relying on blanket bans.
The company estimates that as many as 78% of enterprise AI users are running unmanaged tools their employers have no visibility into — a risk that has already produced costly incidents for some customers. According to Fortune, one Runlayer customer discovered that an AI agent had consumed its entire annual compute budget in a single weekend, running in a loop with no oversight.
Why Investors Are Paying Attention
The market timing is significant. Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will include AI agents by the end of 2026 — up from under 5% in 2025. Agentic AI spending is on pace to hit $201.9 billion this year, and the agentic AI security market alone is valued at $55 billion, projected to reach $888 billion by 2035.
Felicis general partner Jake Storm, who led both the seed and Series A, framed the investment as a structural bet rather than a sector one. “A lot of people view governance as a tax,” Storm told Fortune. “This is actually the unlock. It flips it totally on its head.”
Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla was equally direct. He and Felicis partner Jon Chu stated they wanted to acquire every available dollar of the round. Khosla noted that as AI agents become ubiquitous, enterprises will need a new security fabric — and Runlayer has the potential to become that foundational layer.
The Team and Customer Base
Runlayer is led by CEO Andrew Berman, a three-time founder who previously co-founded Nanit, the AI-powered baby monitor company, and Vowel, an AI video conferencing platform, before serving as Director of AI at Zapier — where he worked closely with both OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company has already attracted engineers from NVIDIA, Anthropic, Cursor, Databricks, Snowflake, Uber, Meta, Google, Block, Palo Alto Networks, Glean, Vercel, and Zapier.
Its customer list spans Fortune 500 companies and high-growth technology businesses including Instacart, Gusto, Decagon, Opendoor, dbt Labs, AngelList, and Lemonade — an impressive roster for a company just seven months out of stealth.
“Every employee will delegate their work to swarms of agents,” said Berman. “Not as a novelty, and not as a side tool, but as a core part of how work gets done. The challenge is that most companies still do not have a secure, scalable way to make that possible. That is the problem Runlayer exists to solve.”
What This Means for the Market
The competitive landscape is intensifying. Wiz, Palo Alto Networks, and Okta are all building agent governance capabilities of their own, but Runlayer is positioning itself as a neutral, cross-provider control layer — a deliberate strategy to avoid being seen as a platform-specific solution.
Storm described it plainly: “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.”
For enterprises navigating an increasingly complex AI stack, Runlayer’s pitch — one governed, auditable path for every employee and every agent — is landing at exactly the right moment. And with $42 million in total funding and backing from two of Silicon Valley’s most respected early-stage investors, it has the runway to prove it can become the default infrastructure layer for the AI-native enterprise.
Key Facts
- Company: Runlayer
- HQ: New York, NY
- Founded: 2025
- Round: Series A — $30 million
- Total Raised: $42 million
- Lead Investor: Felicis
- Participating Investor: Khosla Ventures
- CEO: Andrew Berman (ex-Zapier, Nanit, Vowel)
- Notable Customers: Instacart, Gusto, Opendoor, dbt Labs, AngelList, Lemonade
