Runlayer Emerges From Stealth Mode With $11 Million in Funding

Runlayer has emerged from stealth mode after four months with $11 million in seed funding, led by Khosla Ventures general partner Keith Rabois and Felicis. The New York‑based cybersecurity startup says it has signed dozens of customers, including eight unicorns, and was founded in 2025 to advance enterprise AI transformation with strong security controls. Runlayer focuses on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard and has tapped Anthropic’s David Soria Parra as an advisor to help develop MCP guidance.

Its platform acts as a secure control layer, monitoring AI access and usage to block threats in real time, and can be deployed on customers’ infrastructure or run from Runlayer’s cloud. It offers pre‑vetted MCP servers across environments, logs all MCP calls, and provides threat‑detection models tailored for MCP attack vectors with integration to existing identity providers for fine‑grained permissions. “AI transformation is happening. Security can be the catalyst instead of the blocker,” said co‑founder and CEO Andrew Berman.