Andrew Berman, CEO of his third startup, Nanit and Vowel, today announced that MCP security vendor Runlayer has closed a $11 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Felicis. David Soria Parra, the main author of the MCP standard, joined as an individual advisor. After running secretly for four months, the company has already signed up eight unicorns or publicly listed companies, including Gusto, dbt Labs, Instacart, and Opendoor.

Runlayer integrates gateways, threat detection, observability, enterprise automation development, and fine-grained permissions into a single console: providing IT with a pre-approved MCP server directory and automatically mapping proxy permissions to existing Okta/Entra identity policies, achieving "human and machine equality." The platform provides real-time risk scoring for each MCP request, retains audit logs, supports custom tags and dynamic knowledge graphs, making it easier to track and comply later.

Berman was responsible for AI at Zapier and built early MCP servers. He said that the rapid deployment of the protocol created an "observability blind spot," so he and two former Zapier colleagues left in August to start Runlayer, and built the product and validated customers within four months. The company plans to launch the GA version this year and start local on-premise deployment and multi-cloud environment support, charging based on annual subscriptions and API call volume, aiming to cover over 1 million enterprise MCP traffic by 2026.