Andreessen Horowitz Backs Startup Aiming to ‘Parent’ AI Agents

As a father to two young kids, Guanlan Dai sees a lot of similarities between AI agents and precocious children. Just as parents might childproof their house and avoid giving their kids access to credit cards, so too must developers limit the important files AI agents can access and how much the agents can spend in one go, he said.

Now, Dai, a former Cloudflare technical lead and founding engineer at API connectivity startup Kong, is starting his own company, Runta, to help businesses “parent” their AI agents.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based startup recently raised $20 million in seed funding at a $100 million-plus valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz general partner Martin Casado, Dai told The Information exclusively. (Other investors include a who’s-who of AI researchers and executives, including Google’s Jeff Dean, World Labs’ Fei-Fei Li, Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi, early Google backer Ram Shriram and Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf.)

Runta focuses on two necessary components of running AI agents: providing computing power to the agents, and protections known as guardrails that prevent the agents from going rogue.