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

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

Palma.ai has raised $1.8m in pre-seed funding to help enterprises govern AI agents operating across their systems, with two of its investors already using the platform internally.

The round was led by D11Z, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Deel, Scale Now Ventures and a group of angel investors including senior executives from Cisco and Deel. D11Z and Plug and Play are also customers of Palma.ai, using the platform to give employees access to AI agents with defined permissions and controls.

Palma.ai will use the funding to expand its sales and engineering teams as businesses increasingly deploy AI agents to perform tasks across internal systems.

The funding comes as enterprise AI adoption moves beyond standalone chatbots towards agents capable of carrying out work on behalf of employees.

Many of these agents use the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that allows AI models to connect with company data and tools. While MCP provides a way to establish these connections, organisations can still face challenges managing permissions and monitoring activity across multiple AI products and agent deployments.

Palma.ai aims to address this by providing a central control layer for AI agents, allowing businesses to manage permissions, tools and policies across different AI platforms. Administrators can set policies through a central console, while the platform’s Skills feature turns approved tools into repeatable workflows for tasks such as CRM updates and financial reporting.

The controls are designed to apply across AI products including Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and custom workflows. Palma.ai checks tool calls against configured policies, blocks unauthorised actions and records activity through an audit trail.

The company said this gives employees access to connected AI agents while giving IT and compliance teams greater visibility over how those agents interact with enterprise systems. Palma.ai has been live since early 2026 and was co-founded by CEO Patrick Eden and CTO Julian Kolbe.

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

“The fact that our own investors use Palma.ai is a testament to its ability to govern high-impact agents. This round lets us give governed superpowers to many more enterprises that are putting agents to work,” he said.

Plug and Play partner Carolin Wais added, “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. The best part: every one of us gets powerful agents out of the box, without any end user having to connect their own tools.”

D11Z managing partner Tom Villinger also commented, “D11Z is quickly becoming an AI native VC and Palma is the foundation for that transformation.”

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