Arcade AI Raises $60M Series A to Build the Authorization Layer for AI Agents

Arcade AI, an authorization startup founded in 2024, closed a $60M Series A led by SYN Ventures, with Morgan Stanley and Wipro joining the round. The company builds an OAuth 2.0-based platform that determines which AI agents can perform which actions inside enterprise applications. The round follows a $12M seed raise last year, according to SiliconANGLE.

The Authorization Problem

AI agent deployment in enterprises has a specific failure mode: agents get authentication (proving identity) but not fine-grained authorization (defining what they can do once inside). Arcade’s platform integrates with companies’ identity providers (IdPs) to map existing permission structures onto agent actions. When an employee’s access changes in the IdP, Arcade updates agent permissions automatically, removing the need for manual reconfiguration.

CEO Alex Salazar, who co-founded Arcade with CTO Sam Partee (previously at Oka Inc. and Redis Inc., respectively), framed the problem bluntly in Arcade’s press release: “Agents don’t fail in production because the model is wrong. They fail because nobody can prove that for any given action by an agent, whether that agent on behalf of that user can perform that action on that resource.”

How It Works

Arcade performs authorization using OAuth 2.0 tokens rather than persistent credentials. According to SiliconANGLE’s Maria Deutscher, the platform stores tokens encrypted before transmission to storage and applies salting to mitigate risks from identical credential plaintext values. Typical agent access permissions are valid around the clock, which means a compromised agent has persistent access. Arcade narrows the attack surface by authorizing specific actions rather than broad application access.

The platform also provides access to more than 8,000 MCP tools and logs all agent actions for audit trails.

The Governance Wave

Arcade’s raise lands in the middle of an unprecedented week for agent governance funding and product launches. Within 72 hours, TrueFoundry launched Agent Gateway, Databricks released Omnigent, and Akamai announced its Know Your Agent framework. NCT’s deep dive on the governance control plane market published earlier today covers the broader convergence.

Arcade plans to use the new capital to expand its governance features and MCP tool catalog. The bet: as enterprises move from agent pilots to production deployments, authorization becomes the infrastructure chokepoint that every deployment must pass through.