SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 21, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Today, Keycard emerged from stealth with its identity and access platform for AI agents that integrates with organizations’ existing user identity solutions. Keycard’s platform identifies AI agents, lets users assign task-based permissions and dynamically enforces policy while tracking all activity. With Keycard, organizations can deploy AI agents into production with complete trust, knowing they are only capable of performing the intended actions of their users and builders.
“AI agents represent a once-in-a-generation shift, greater than the SaaS and cloud wave combined. But without trusted access controls, they can’t leave the lab. Keycard provides the guardrails that allow agents to act safely on behalf of people and businesses, unlocking the true potential of the agent economy,” said Ian Livingstone, co-founder and CEO of Keycard.
Keycard was co-founded by Ian Livingstone, Matthew Creager and Jared Hanson. Livingstone and Creager served as senior leaders at Snyk where they built the platform engineering and developer experience divisions as revenues grew from $30 million to $300 million. Hanson was the Chief Architect at Auth0 before joining Okta as a senior technical leader, and he created Passport.js, the most popular authentication framework for Node.js that is downloaded millions of times every week. At these companies, the trio witnessed how developers constantly struggled to connect services and applications together within and across organizations at enterprise scale – often leading to painful security incidents and significant product delays.
This problem has only been exacerbated with AI agents. Today they spawn by the thousands and operate autonomously across systems and organizational boundaries. They need different permissions based on the task they are working on, which people and companies they are doing the task for, the resources they are accessing and who owns those resources.
Existing solutions were not architected for AI agents. They were built for a world of static, human-driven point-and-click interactions and not the machine-driven dynamic, ephemeral and autonomous nature of AI agents. AI is expected to drive the creation of the greatest number of new identities with privileged and sensitive access according to CyberArk’s 2025 Identity Security Landscape.
Keycard purpose-built its identity and access platform for AI agents. Its approach is dynamic, contextual and built for trust in an AI agent driven world:
- Keycard cryptographically proves who an agent is, who they act for and whether they are authorized backed by federated, standards-based protocols – preventing lock-in to a few centralized platforms while interoperating with leading agents from companies like Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI.
- Keycard replaces static secrets and API keys with dynamic, identity-bound and task-scoped tokens that enable the enforcement of policy that adapts to the changing trust landscape of users, systems and companies without any code changes. These tokens are tied to the agent’s attested workload identity, compute provider or device for end-to-end trust.
- Keycard enforces contextual access controls at runtime, giving users and companies the tools to express relationship and task-based policy using its identity-aware data model, enabling the immediate revocation of access with a single API call.
- Keycard operates at internet scale, designed for agentic performance expectations: dynamic, ephemeral, performance-obsessed, globally available infrastructure that models the complex mixed-identity and resource relationships of human and agent interactions, a fundamentally different design than existing solutions.
- Keycard provides developers with a set of SDKs they can use to build trusted agentic applications without needing to be identity or security experts, which gives security the context and feedback loops required to govern AI agents as they are developed instead of after they are in production.
Keycard contributes to emerging standards including Model Context Protocol (MCP), WIMSE and OAuth extensions for agents and is the first production implementation with support for OAuth 2.1 Client ID Metadata Documents in MCP.
This week Matthew Creager is giving a keynote on what the future looks like for agent security and Jared Hanson is on the agentic identity and security panel at the AI Security Summit being presented by founding partners Snyk and AI.Engineer: https://aisecuritysummit.com/.
Keycard Raises $38 Million from Andreessen Horowitz, boldstart ventures and Acrew Capital
Today Keycard also announced that it has raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding. Andreessen Horowitz and boldstart ventures co-led the $8 million seed round, and Acrew Capital led the $30 million Series A. Angels who participated include Ian Andrews (CRO at Groq), Ryan Carlson (president at Chainguard), Emilio Escobar (CISO at Datadog), Karl McGuinness (former Chief Product Architect at Okta) and Matias Woloski (co-founder and former CTO at Auth0).
Zane Lackey, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said: “This is the Auth0 moment for agent access. The agent ecosystem needs foundational authorization infrastructure. This team has the rare combination of infrastructure expertise and standards leadership required to build it.”
Ed Sim, founder and general partner at boldstart ventures, said: “Winning in agentic security takes a rare mix: build for developers and nail security from day one. Ian, Matthew and Jared did it before at Snyk and Auth0 and they’re doing it again with Keycard. We’re thrilled to back Ian and Matthew a second time (their first company was acquired by Snyk) alongside Jared. This is the team to define the identity and trust category for the agent era.”
Asad Khaliq, founding partner at Acrew Capital, said: “Trusted agents define the next chapter of computing. Developers will lead the way and need durable identity and access foundations. Keycard extends trust and control to the agent layer.”
Keycard plans to use the funding to continue to advance its identity and access platform and to expand its R&D team.
About Keycard
Keycard’s mission is to unlock the power of AI agents by giving developers and enterprises the foundations they need to build and adopt trusted agentic applications at scale. Its identity and access platform provides real-time, contextual guardrails, enabling the transition from static, human-driven workflows to machine-driven, autonomous, agentic applications. Keycard is a remote-first company and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, boldstart ventures and Acrew Capital. For more information, visit: https://www.keycard.ai/.
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A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/d9bd728b-20a6-424b-b4a9-10018839c4b7
