Keycard, a company specializing in providing the identity infrastructure necessary for AI agents, has officially launched from stealth mode with a significant capital injection. The company announced it has secured a total of $38 million in funding, which was raised across two separate rounds: an $8 million seed round and a $30 million Series A round. The seed funding was co-led by prominent venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Boldstart Ventures, signaling strong early confidence in Keycard’s mission. The larger Series A round was led by Acrew Capital and included participation from a wide range of investors such as Essence Ventures, Exceptional Capital, Mantis VC, Modern Technical Fund, Tapestry Ventures, Vermillion Cliffs Ventures, and several angel investors.
The San Francisco-based company was established in 2025 by former senior leaders from Snyk and Okta, bringing a wealth of experience in security and identity management. Keycard has developed a platform that directly addresses the critical need for Identity and Access Management (IAM) for AI agents. The core goal of this platform is to help organizations confidently and securely deploy AI agents into production environments. By providing a robust identity framework, Keycard is tackling a major hurdle in the enterprise adoption of AI, ensuring that businesses can move beyond the testing phase with complete trust in their autonomous agents.
At the heart of Keycard’s solution is a reliance on cryptography to establish and verify the crucial elements of each AI agent. The platform uses these cryptographic proofs to establish the agent’s unique identity, confirm its ownership, and validate its current authorization status. This foundation allows Keycard to enforce precise, contextual access controls at runtime. This capability is vital, as it gives organizations and their end-users significantly increased visibility and control over every action and activity performed by each deployed AI agent, mitigating risks associated with uncontrolled automation.
A key technical innovation in the platform is the use of dynamic, identity-bound, and task-scoped tokens. This modern approach completely replaces the use of static secrets and traditional API keys, which are often a source of security vulnerabilities. By utilizing these dynamic tokens, organizations gain the power to enforce sophisticated security policies that can adapt in real-time to a changing operational environment without requiring any changes to the underlying code. Keycard claims its platform is built to operate reliably at internet scale, ensuring it can cover globally available infrastructure and provide developers with the essential tools to build truly trusted, agentic applications.
With the new investment, Keycard is poised to accelerate its growth and platform development. The capital will be strategically used to further advance its IAM platform specifically tailored for AI agents and to significantly expand its research and development team. Keycard co-founder and CEO Ian Livingstone emphasized the transformative potential of their work, stating that AI agents represent a shift even greater than the combined impact of the SaaS and cloud waves. He stressed that without reliable, trusted access controls like those Keycard provides, agents cannot safely operate outside of a lab environment, and it is these “guardrails” that will ultimately unlock the true potential of the agent economy.
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