In 2024, three founders walked into a datacenter, not the start of a joke, but the beginning of Barndoor AI, and the punchline is $13.6 million in fresh seed funding to solve one of the messiest, most overlooked problems in the AI gold rush, what the hell happens when your agents start acting like employees?
Oren Michels isn’t new to paradigm shifts. He helped define API management when mobile apps were still figuring out what push notifications were. Now he’s back with co-founders Kirsten Spoljaric and Tim Stacey, and this time, they’re not just managing access, they’re controlling chaos. Their company, Barndoor AI, is the first control plane built for the agentic enterprise. That’s not a slogan, that’s a fact, and if your AI agents are already talking to sensitive systems, your CISO should’ve called them yesterday.
Headquartered out of 1216 Broadway in NYC with a lean team of under ten, they’re proving that small squads still punch like heavyweights. Their core mission? Let business teams run wild with AI without inviting a compliance horror show. Because let’s face it, autonomous agents are the new shadow IT, and pretending they don’t exist is like leaving the barn door wide open.
Crosslink Capital saw the opportunity first, leading a round that also drew in Preface Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Gaingels, Rob Hayes, Natalie Diggins, Scott Banister and Cyan Banister, and more. Eric Chin, a Crosslink partner with a nose for SaaS gold, is already on the board, alongside Merrie Williamson, the ex-Microsoft CVP who’s seen cloud scale from every angle.
This isn’t just funding, it’s fuel for execution. Sixty percent of it is going straight into product development, dynamic policy engines, automated access intelligence, and a FedRAMP push by Q1 2026. Another 25% goes to global reach, including a London hub and deep cloud alliances. The rest? Hiring engineers and compliance ninjas who know the alphabet soup of PCI, HIPAA, and the rest of the regulatory jungle.
Barndoor’s tech inspects every AI agent request before it even breathes near your data, logs every move in immutable trails, and adapts access based on real-time identity and intent. It’s context-aware control, identity meets motive, in a language AI understands.
So yeah, Barndoor AI didn’t just close a round. They opened the floodgates on a problem everyone else was too nervous to name. Enterprises are waking up to agent sprawl, and Barndoor’s already holding the keys.
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