We're excited to announce that Arcade.dev has raised $12M in seed funding to tackle the biggest bottleneck in AI: secure authentication for agents.
Secure Authentication for Agents
You probably use ChatGPT or Claude to write emails for you. But have you noticed that you can't send that email directly from those agents? You can work with AI to plan a meal but it can't order the ingredients. You might ask it to book flights, but it can't complete the transaction. Some products let you pull files from Docs, but how many allow the AI to actually edit that document?AI Agents have incredible potential, but they remain trapped in chat interfaces because the systems we care about—Gmail, Slack, LinkedIn, GitHub, Salesforce, Workday—all require personal authentication. Your AI assistants are blocked from taking meaningful action because they can't securely access these systems on your behalf.
This isn't just a technical limitation—it's fundamentally an authentication problem. In fact, it's the biggest auth problem the industry has ever faced.
Our Solution: AI Auth
Arcade.dev has solved this challenge. We've built a secure authentication platform that enables AI agents to take action across the systems people use every day.Our approach is clean and secure by design. Developers can implement it in minutes. Enterprises can run it in their VPCs. Everyone involved—from CTOs to CISOs to developers—can confidently check this critical box and move forward with building truly powerful AI agents.Creating something this elegant required sophisticated engineering beneath the surface. We've made the complex simple, enabling developers to focus on building great agent experiences rather than wrestling with authentication challenges.
$12M to Scale Our Vision
This vision has resonated strongly with investors who understand both enterprise software and the AI revolution. Our seed round was led by Laude Ventures (Pete Sonsini – known for investments in Databricks and Perplexity) with participation from:
Their support validates not just our approach, but the critical nature of the problem we're solving. With this funding, we're accelerating development of our platform and expanding our ecosystem of integrations.
Early Adoption and Partnerships
Our approach has already gained significant traction in the AI community. Harrison at LangChain recognized the value of what we were building and became our first design partner. Together, we've developed LangGraph/Arcade sample applications that demonstrate capabilities previously impossible in agent systems.
These early partnerships have been crucial in refining our platform while proving its value across different use cases and integration scenarios.
The Team Behind Arcade
Building this solution required exceptional talent with deep expertise across multiple domains. We've assembled a team with decades of combined experience in authentication, AI, and enterprise software. Our founding team includes former Okta auth experts who pioneered developer identity, AI engineers who've contributed to major frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex, and leaders who've built and scaled successful startups.
Between us, we've deployed hundreds of enterprise AI systems, written millions of lines of code, created the most-watched auth content on YouTube, and literally wrote the book on early-stage sales. Our backgrounds span from Redis to leading AI research teams, with deep expertise in security, user experience, and building developer-friendly platforms.
What makes this team special isn't just technical expertise—it's our shared vision for what AI agents should be capable of and our relentless focus on solving the authentication challenge that's been holding everything back.
From Identity to AI: A Natural Evolution
As Pete Sonsini of Laude Ventures explained it: "The rise of agentic AI has created an entirely new class of problems for businesses that new AI upstarts aren't focused on solving, nor do they have the expertise to solve. It doesn't matter how exciting a shiny new solution is if it can't work within existing systems."
Our journey began with an attempt to build our own agent, but quickly evolved as we identified the critical gap in the market: enabling AI to securely take action across systems. Organizations have been forced to choose between granting dangerous super-user access or limiting AI to public data. We've created a third path—a secure framework for AI to take authenticated actions across enterprise systems, transforming AI from conversational novelty into practical automation.
What This Means for Developers and Enterprises
Arcade's platform provides developers and organizations with hundreds of pre-built "agent tools" for services like Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, and dozens of other commonly used applications. Our SDK enables engineers to create and test custom, secure tools in minutes and integrate their agents with any API, data, logic, or system.
This means AI can finally move beyond chat interfaces to become a true digital assistant—one that doesn't just suggest actions but actually completes them securely on your behalf.
Looking Forward: Authentication for AI Agents
With this funding and our growing team, we're poised to fundamentally change how AI agents operate within organizations. By solving the authentication challenge, we're unlocking the next phase of AI adoption—where agents become trusted partners rather than conversational toys.
We're incredibly excited about the problem we're solving, the product we've built, and the impact it will have on the future of AI.
Let's build the future of secure, actionable AI together. Sign up today.
