Keycard Labs, Inc. announced that it has raised $38 million in a combined inception round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Acrew Capital and Boldstart Ventures to build what it describes as the “trust fabric” for the emerging world of AI-agent driven systems. Keycard says that traditional identity and access management (IAM) frameworks were designed for human users interacting via static credentials, point-and-click interfaces and long-lived roles but the shift to autonomous, ephemeral AI agents operating across systems demands entirely new primitives. It argues: “Agents are ephemeral, coming into existence and disappearing in seconds and at tremendous scale, requiring the ability to dynamically provision, escalate, and revoke access at runtime.” The company’s platform offers features such as identity-bound tokens, mixed delegation chains, fine-grained, task-scoped policy enforcement and contextual audit logs designed to give enterprises visibility, control and traceability across agent-driven workloads.
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Keycard is now available in early access, and the company says it is enabling organisations to “Adopt internal or external agents and expose your tools, APIs, and services securely, no brittle auth required.” With agentic systems seen as a potential productivity wave beyond SaaS, mobile and cloud combined, Keycard positions itself as the backbone for secure AI-agent orchestration. The platform supports everything from building secure agentic applications using SDKs to coordinating multi-agent systems across teams and companies “Build next-generation products … Enable your users to delegate work and complete transactions confidently with trust, visibility, and accountability for every action.” In short, Keycard is betting that as AI agents proliferate, organisations will demand identity and access solutions architected for machines, not just humans and the $38 million funding gives it a runway to build out that infrastructure.
