Palma.ai raises $1.8m pre-seed to govern enterprise AI agents

Patrick Eden has sold enterprise software to large companies before. His previous company, Replex, was acquired by Cisco in 2021 with Fortune 100 customers on its books. With Palma.ai, which he co-founded with CTO Julian Kolbe, he is working on a problem that has grown as quickly as companies have deployed AI agents: once an agent is connected to company systems, someone has to decide what it can do and record what it did.

"Every company is about to give AI agents the keys to its systems. The question is whether anyone is watching the door," said Eden, CEO and co-founder of Palma.ai.

The San Francisco company has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding. D11Z led the round, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Deel, Scale Now Ventures and angel investors including executives from Cisco and Deel. Palma.ai will use the capital to expand its go-to-market and engineering teams to meet demand from large organisations rolling out agents.

Most agents now connect to internal data through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard linking AI models to company systems. MCP handles connectivity. It provides no central point of control. Each AI tool keeps its own isolated permissions, so IT and security teams have no unified way to govern, restrict or audit what independent agents are doing across the business.

Palma.ai replaces that sprawl with one governed integration layer for every user and agent, whichever AI product they use. Administrators define policies, MCP tools and Skills in one place. Skills are approved, repeatable workflows such as standardised CRM updates or financial reporting. The same rules then apply across Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and custom workflows. The platform enforces them at runtime on every call and records each event in a tamper-evident audit trail.

"We built Palma.ai so that enterprises can hand agents real permissions and still know exactly who did what, with which tool, under which policy across all the platforms an enterprise runs," Eden said.

D11Z and Plug and Play already run Palma.ai internally to give every team member governed agents that do real work at scale. Carolin Wais, Partner at Plug and Play, said the product sits apart from much of the market. "Most companies in this space are building MCP gateways for small engineering teams. Palma is what lets Plug and Play operate as a global, AI-native VC without sacrificing control or security over what our agents can do," she said.

Wais added that setup had been simple for staff. "Every one of us gets powerful agents out of the box, without any end user having to connect their own tools."

At D11Z, the platform sits at the centre of a wider change. "D11Z is quickly becoming an AI-native VC and Palma is the foundation for that transformation," said Tom Villinger, Managing Partner. Patrick Krönlein, Principal at D11Z, pointed to portability as a deciding factor. "We are both an investor and a customer because the technology solves one of the hardest problems in AI right now: agent governance at scale, across multiple platforms. It also means we can move to any agent platform and take our governance with us," he said.

The round points to a shift in where value sits in enterprise AI. Companies now use several model providers at once alongside agents they build themselves. Tying permissions to any single vendor turns governance into a lock-in risk, and a layer that travels between platforms addresses that directly. Regulation adds pressure. With the EU AI Act in force, the lack of central oversight over agents is a compliance exposure as well as a security one, and organisations operating across several jurisdictions will face similar questions elsewhere.

Investor-customers carry weight as early validation, though they are not independent buyers. The larger test for Palma.ai will come from enterprises with no stake in the company and with larger infrastructure and security vendors competing for the same control point. A $1.8 million pre-seed round is modest for that contest. What the company has on its side is timing: agent adoption is moving from pilots into daily operations, and the question Eden raises about who is watching the door is one every security team will have to answer.