Investing in Keycard: Building the Trust Layer for AI Agents

Like many of you, I already use AI agents every day - from personal agents that manage my calendar to vendor agents that handle support. It’s clear more and more of our work is becoming “agentified.”

But, when agents make mistakes, it’s painful. And the more complex the task, the harder the clean up.

Think about an agent that accidentally:

• Closes a customer ticket before the issue is actually resolved

• Mistakenly overwrites critical data during a sync across systems

• Pushes incorrect numbers into a report

Deploying agents that you trust comes from knowing they can only perform intended actions. It’s an identity problem - who is the agent acting on behalf of and what tasks are they allowed to perform. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but the company that does it will enable an entire ecosystem of agentic work.

The team I firmly believe will solve this challenge is Keycard. And today, I’m grateful to share Modern Technical Fund’s investment in their seed round as they announce their $38M Seed + Series A fundraises from a top notch group of investors including friends at A16z, Boldstart Ventures, Acrew Capital, Essence VC, Mantis VC, Exceptional Capital, Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, and Tapestry VC.

Keycard’s approach to agent identity is dynamic and contextual:

• Proves and connects identity: Keycard securely verifies who an agent represents and what they’re allowed to do.

• Replaces API keys with smart tokens: Instead of static keys, Keycard issues short-lived, identity-tied tokens that automatically adapt to changing trust conditions.

• Gives real-time access control: It lets users instantly grant or revoke access and enforce fine-grained, context-aware policies, helping developers easily build and manage secure AI agents.

The Keycard team is full of absolute rockstars. Two of the Co-Founders - Ian Livingstone and Matthew Creager - have a long history of working and founding companies together. They were most recently at Snyk building the platform engineering and developer experience teams - key areas of expertise for Keycard. The founding team is rounded out with Jared Hanson, one of the leading identity experts from Auth0 and Okta.

I love working with this team - and look forward to the regular texts with Ian on everything from customers to key hires. Their thoughtfulness, ambition, and raw IQ make them a really, really special team.

Agents are only as powerful as the trust we can place in them, and Keycard is making that trust possible. I’m proud to back this team on their mission to build one of the biggest missing pieces of agent infrastructure.