{"id":85210,"date":"2026-06-25T01:56:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T01:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/85210\/"},"modified":"2026-06-25T01:56:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T01:56:32","slug":"exclusive-vinod-khosla-wanted-every-dollar-of-runlayers-round-it-just-raised-30-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/85210\/","title":{"rendered":"Exclusive: Vinod Khosla wanted every dollar of Runlayer’s round. It just raised $30 million"},"content":{"rendered":"

When longtime tech investor Vinod Khosla<\/a> heard that Runlayer\u2014the startup trying to become the default infrastructure layer governing how every corporate employee interacts<\/a> with AI agents\u2014was raising a new round, his response was unambiguous: he wanted \u201cto buy every available dollar of the round.\u201d Now, that conviction is official.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Runlayer raised a $30 million Series A led by Felicis<\/a>, with Khosla Ventures participating, Fortune learned exclusively. Felicis preempted the round which brought Runlayer\u2019s total capital raised to $42 million.<\/p>\n

The startup, which launched out of stealth<\/a> just seven months ago with an $11 million seed from the same two investors, is tackling one of enterprise tech\u2019s most pressing problems. Companies are deploying AI agents<\/a> everywhere, but no one has a reliable way to see what those agents are doing<\/a>, control what they access, or stop them from going rogue. Last year, one of Runlayer\u2019s customers discovered that an agent had blown through its entire annual AI-compute budget<\/a> in a single weekend, running in a loop.<\/p>\n

Runlayer is essentially a corporate app store and control room rolled into one. Employees can plug in any AI tool\u2014OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, Salesforce\u2019s Agentforce, custom-built agents\u2014and get a pre-approved way to use them, with company data already connected and guardrails already set. IT and security teams, meanwhile, get a single dashboard showing exactly what every AI agent in the organization is doing<\/a>, what data it touched, and how much it cost. The platform also surfaces \u201cshadow AI<\/a>\u201c\u2014tools employees are using without their company\u2019s knowledge\u2014a problem some reports suggest could be as high as 78% of enterprise AI users<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery employee will delegate their work to swarms of agents. Not as a novelty, and not as a side tool, but as a core part of how work gets done.\u201d CEO Andrew Berman told Fortune.<\/p>\n

Berman, a three-time founder, previously cofounded Nanit\u2014the AI-powered baby monitor that as of 2024 was doing an estimated $100 million-plus in revenue<\/a>\u2014and Vowel, an AI video conferencing platform that raised $17.8 million before being acquired by Zapier in 2023<\/a>. He then served as Zapier\u2019s director of AI, working directly with teams at OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n

He founded Runlayer 10-and-a-half months ago. \u201cI signed my term sheet the day I had my first child. I think I was in the hospital. We just kept seeing so much enterprise pull, and every company struggling with the same problem,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Since then, Runlayer has signed more than 12 unicorn customers<\/a>\u2014including Instacart<\/a>, Gusto, Opendoor, dbt Labs, and AngelList\u2014and expanded into financial services, where a Fortune 500 bank is now using Runlayer to monitor more than 100,000 employees\u2019 AI activity across 200,000 devices. Half of Gusto\u2019s company uses the product daily.<\/p>\n

Runlayer\u2019s timing isn\u2019t incidental. Gartner<\/a> projects<\/a> that 40% of enterprise applications will include AI agents by year-end 2026\u2014up from less than 5% in 2025\u2014and agentic AI spending is on pace to hit $201.9 billion this year<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The agentic AI security market alone<\/a> is valued at $55 billion in 2026, projected to reach $888 billion by 2035. The space is getting crowded\u2014Wiz, Palo Alto Networks<\/a>, and identity giant Okta<\/a> are all building<\/a> agent governance capabilities. Felicis GP Jake Storm, who led both rounds, isn\u2019t dismissing the competition, and is instead reframing it. \u201cA lot of people view governance as a tax,\u201d Storm told Fortune. \u201cThis is actually the unlock. It flips it totally on its head.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

He sees Runlayer as structurally different from the encroaching incumbents: \u201cThis is a Switzerland business. No platform can own this\u2014a neutral, cross-provider control layer is absolutely critical if we actually believe in the future of agents performing work.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berman won\u2019t disclose revenue figures, but says the company is nine months ahead of the product roadmap it presented to investors at seed and has expanded from an MCP<\/a>\u2014a relatively new open standard that lets AI agents plug into external tools and data\u2014focused product into a full interoperability layer spanning agents, plugins, and skills across the enterprise stack.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need a single pane of glass that watches everything, controls and has visibility into everything that\u2019s going on,\u201d Berman said. \u201cWho watches the watchman? That\u2019s what we do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When longtime tech investor Vinod Khosla heard that Runlayer\u2014the startup trying to become the default infrastructure layer governing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[405,10211,53,7537,428,41663,11160,383,157,18907,10021,139],"class_list":["post-85210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agentic-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-angellist","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence-agents","tag-governance","tag-gusto","tag-instacart","tag-khosla-ventures","tag-openai","tag-series-a","tag-vc-funding","tag-venture-capital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}