Runlayer Raises $30M Series A as Enterprise AI Governance Becomes Core Infrastructure

Runlayer has raised $30M in Series A funding led by Felicis, with participation from Khosla Ventures, bringing the New York-based company's total funding to $42M. Founded in August 2025, Runlayer develops an enterprise AI governance platform that helps organizations securely deploy, monitor, and manage AI agents at scale.

The funding underscores growing investor conviction that AI governance is becoming foundational infrastructure as enterprises move from AI experimentation to production deployment. Runlayer was founded by Andrew Berman (Co-Founder & CEO), Tal Peretz (Co-Founder), and Vitor Balocco (Co-Founder & Chief Architect), whose experience building AI systems at Zapier shaped the company's focus on governance, security, and observability. Rather than simply enabling AI adoption, Runlayer is addressing the operational reality that organizations now need visibility, policy enforcement, and security across increasingly autonomous AI agents. That distinction is becoming one of the defining investment themes across enterprise AI.

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What Happened

Runlayer just raised $30M in Series A funding led by Felicis, with participation from Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to $42M. That headline says more than another funding round. It signals that the race to secure enterprise AI is accelerating just as quickly as the race to deploy it.

Founded in August 2025, Runlayer has moved with remarkable speed. Andrew Berman (Co-Founder & CEO), Tal Peretz, (Co-Founder), and Vitor Balocco, (Co-Founder & Chief Architect), built the company around a challenge enterprises are only beginning to confront. Investors including Jake Storm, General Partner at Felicis, along with Jon Chu, Partner at Khosla Ventures, and Vinod Khosla, recognized that governance is becoming one of the defining infrastructure layers of enterprise AI. Additional details are available in Runlayer's official Series A announcement.

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Why This Matters

The irony is hard to miss. Companies want AI agents working around the clock until they realize those agents have the digital equivalent of office keys, corporate passwords, and an expense account. Suddenly, moving fast becomes a conversation security teams would rather avoid.

Runlayer exists to make AI adoption less about uncontrolled experimentation and more about operational discipline. The company provides a model-neutral control plane where enterprises can deploy AI agents with governance built in from the start rather than added later after problems emerge. This is increasingly important as organizations adopt multiple AI clients, models, agents, and integrations across departments. AI is becoming operational infrastructure, and infrastructure without governance eventually becomes operational risk.

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Market Context

Runlayer's founding team understood this problem before most enterprises knew how to describe it. Before launching Runlayer, Andrew Berman served as Director of AI at Zapier. Tal Peretz helped build Zapier MCP after leading machine learning in the Israeli Air Force, while Vitor Balocco specialized in MCP security and infrastructure. Their experience came from solving production AI challenges rather than theorizing about them.

The platform supports enterprise AI environments through governance, policy enforcement, permissions, runtime protection, observability, auditability, and cost management from a centralized control layer. The company's work also aligns closely with the growing adoption of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that enables AI models and agents to securely connect with enterprise applications, tools, and data sources. As MCP adoption accelerates, governance becomes just as important as connectivity.

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Competitive Landscape

Runlayer's early traction helps explain why investors moved quickly. Within months of emerging from stealth, the company signed dozens of enterprise customers, including more than 12 unicorns or public companies. Customers include Instacart, Gusto, Decagon, Opendoor, dbt Labs, AngelList, Lemonade, and Rippling.

Support from respected AI leaders, including David Soria Parra, Co-Creator of MCP at Anthropic, further reinforces Runlayer's position within the rapidly expanding AI infrastructure ecosystem. As enterprises adopt more AI systems simultaneously, governance platforms are beginning to occupy the same strategic position identity management platforms established during the cloud era. Organizations rarely notice governance when it works well. They notice immediately when it doesn't.

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What This Signals

The funding matters, but the larger signal is execution. Runlayer identified an operational problem before it became mainstream, shipped a product quickly, and earned enterprise trust while the broader market was still debating AI strategy. That combination tends to attract sophisticated investors because infrastructure companies often win by becoming indispensable rather than highly visible.

Enterprise AI has entered a new phase. Building capable models is no longer enough. Organizations now need systems that govern how those models interact with employees, applications, and sensitive data. The companies solving that layer of the stack are likely to shape enterprise AI adoption for years to come.

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