On Monday, a brand new Mannequin Context Protocol safety startup referred to as Runlayer launched out of stealth with $11 million in seed funding from Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Felicis.
It was created by third-time founder Andrew Berman (earlier firms: baby-monitor maker Nanit and an AI video conferencing instrument, Vowel, that bought to Zapier in 2024).
Within the 4 months since Runlayer launched its product in stealth, it has signed dozens of consumers, together with eight unicorns or public firms like Gusto, dbt Labs, Instacart, and Opendoor, it says. It additionally nabbed David Soria Parra, the lead creator of MCP, as an angel and advisor, Berman tells TechCrunch. (Parra didn’t reply to our request for remark.)
Parra’s staff at Anthropic launched the protocol in November 2024 as an open supply undertaking. MCP has since develop into the de facto commonplace for permitting AI brokers to attach with the information and programs they should work independently. It permits brokers to entry information, transfer it, alter it, and execute enterprise processes with out human oversight.
The protocol is now supported by each main mannequin maker together with OpenAI, Microsoft, AWS, and Google, in addition to thousands of tech and enterprise companies; simply to call a couple of: Atlassian, Asana, Stripe, Block, and others starting from banks to client items producers.
“Everybody talks about AI,” Berman, Runlayer’s CEO, informed TechCrunch, “however AI is admittedly solely as helpful because the instruments and the sources it has entry to.”
The issue is, the MCP protocol itself doesn’t include much security out of the box, so many MCP implementations have already been discovered to be weak in quite a lot of methods.
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The poster youngsters are in all probability GitHub and Asana. In Might, researchers at Invariant Labs found a immediate injection vulnerability in MCP servers that allowed them to seize information from personal GitHub repositories (ones that shouldn’t have been accessible to the general public). Asana found and fixed a vulnerability in its MCP server in June that would have uncovered buyer information. There have since been many extra types of attacks discovered to work on frequent MCP server setups.
As you may anticipate, such safety points have given rise to quite a few MCP safety merchandise, together with merchandise from big-name firms like Cloudflare, Docker, and Wiz — in addition to a number of startups tackling extra particular merchandise.
The most typical kind of MCP safety product lately is a gateway, primarily a safety layer for figuring out the brokers and controlling their entry to apps.
Runlayer plans to face out on this crowded market by being an all-in-one safety instrument that mixes a gateway with options like menace detection that analyzes each MCP request; observability that watched all agentic exercise throughout all MCP servers that IT has permitted; enterprise improvement the place IT can construct customized AI automations for enterprise customers; and detailed permissions that work with current id suppliers like Okta and Entra.
Like different rivals, akin to open source Obot, Runlayer enterprise customers are offered with an Okta-like catalog of the pre-vetted MCP servers that their IT will permit brokers to entry. Runlayer matches the brokers’ app permissions to the human customers’ permissions. For example, some folks may need read-only entry to monetary programs, some write entry (the flexibility to vary the information). Others don’t have any entry in any respect.
Berman believes Runlayer stands out from the gang, not simply with the breadth of the product, however due to the staff’s expertise. He based the startup as a result of, after promoting Vowel to Zapier, he turned the director of Zapier’s AI, and constructed one of many first MCP servers, working intently on the time with OpenAI and Anthropic, he stated.
“What are the issues that we noticed with the protocol? One, it was the safety danger as a result of it was adopted so shortly,” he stated. There have been “blind spots” in areas like observability and audits, that make it dangerous for enterprises to roll out to customers.
So in August, “we left our jobs. We signed up David Soria Parra, the creator of the spec, and in 4 months, we’ve signed up eight unicorns,” he stated of himself and his co-founders from Zapier Tal Peretz and Vitor Balocco.
Different advisors and traders within the firm, Berman says, embody head of safety at Cursor Travis McPeak, and founding father of Neon Nikita Shamgunov.
