Company: Barndoor
Founder CEO: Oren Michels
Website: https://barndoor.ai/
About Barndoor
Founded in 2024, Barndoor AI emerged at a critical inflection point in enterprise technology: the moment when artificial intelligence shifted from experimental tool to essential workforce. The company addresses what CEO Oren Michels calls the 100,000 agent problem, the reality that enterprises will soon manage more AI agents than human employees, yet lack the infrastructure to govern them safely.
Barndoor delivers the first Control Plane for AI, giving enterprises centralized governance and security for their growing AI workforce. Supporting the emerging Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard, Barndoor sits between AI agents and enterprise systems, managing context-aware, secure data flows with fine-grained policy enforcement by agent, role, action, and application. Real-time monitoring and compliance-ready reporting provide visibility and control, enabling organizations to scale AI confidently and safely.
The founding team brings decades of experience shaping previous technology revolutions. Michels pioneered the API management category as co-founder and CEO of Mashery, which Intel acquired in 2013. During the rise of mobile applications, he built secure API infrastructure that enabled developers to connect apps to enterprise systems safely. That experience proved foundational. Oren recognized early that enterprises face a familiar pattern with AI: transformative technology creating both enormous opportunity and concentrated risk, with traditional security models unable to bridge the gap.
The challenge Barndoor tackles is unprecedented. AI agents differ fundamentally from human users or traditional software. They are probabilistic rather than deterministic, interpreting prompts and taking actions that may diverge from intent. As Michels describes them, AI agents behave like enthusiastic interns, eager to help but without understanding consequences. Traditional identity and access control systems designed for humans cannot enforce the nuanced permissions AI agents require. An enterprise might want an AI agent to create new Salesforce records but never edit existing ones, a level of granularity that traditional identity access management tools cannot provide.
Since its founding, Barndoor has confronted challenges inherent in creating an entirely new category of enterprise infrastructure. The company launched when most organizations remained unsatisfied with AI productivity, yet large enterprises invested heavily anyway, recognizing the strategic imperative to transform before the technology matured. This created simultaneous pressure to move quickly and cautiously, balancing innovation velocity against risk management.
The company secured $13.6 million in Series Seed funding in May 2025, led by Crosslink Capital. By late 2025, Barndoor launched self-serve capabilities, enabling enterprises to test-drive the platform and begin governing their AI deployments at scale.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang captured the transformation: these agentic AIs represent a digital workforce that IT departments must manage just as HR manages human employees. Barndoor makes this management possible. The platform enables enterprises to treat AI agents like new hires, testing them, observing their behavior, granting graduated permissions, and scaling their responsibilities as they prove trustworthy. This approach transforms AI from unpredictable risk into governed asset, unlocking the productivity gains enterprises seek while maintaining the control that boards and regulators demand. Barndoor helps organizations navigate the fundamental tension of this technological moment: the imperative to innovate with AI balanced against the obligation to protect what matters.
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