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Palma.ai raises $1.8 million as its own investors deploy its technology to become AI-native VCs with powerful agents
Berlin, 25.09.2026 (PresseBox) - Palma.ai, the enterprise platform that governs AI agents at runtime, has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding. D11Z led the round, with participation from Plug and Play Ventures, Deel, Scale Now Ventures and angel investors including executives from Cisco & Deel. Two of the investors, D11Z and Plug and Play, are already running Palma.ai to provide every team member powerful, governed AI agents that can do real work at scale.
The funding will help the company bring the platform to more enterprise customers by expanding its go-to-market and engineering teams to meet demand from large organisations rolling out AI agents.
As AI evolves from simple chatbots into a multi-vendor ecosystem of external and in-house agents executing tasks, organisations face a critical blind spot. These agents typically use the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that acts as the essential plumbing between AI models and internal company data. However, while MCP handles this basic connectivity, it doesn't provide centralised control. Each AI tool still manages its own isolated permissions, leaving IT and security teams without a unified control tower to govern, restrict, or audit what these independent agents are doing. With regulations like the EU AI Act now in force, that gap is a compliance problem as well as a security one.
Palma.ai replaces this sprawl with a single, governed integration layer for every user and AI agent across an organisation, regardless of the AI product they use. Through Palma.ai, administrators centrally define policies, MCP tools, and the Skills that turn those tools into approved, repeatable ways of working, such as standardised CRM updates or financial reporting. These capabilities and guardrails are then applied uniformly across any AI model - whether Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or custom workflows. Palma.ai enforces these rules at runtime on every call, ensuring agents execute only approved actions while recording every event in a tamper-evident audit trail. This unified approach empowers employees with highly capable, system-connected agents while finally giving security and compliance teams the centralised oversight they require.
Patrick Eden, CEO and co-founder of Palma.ai 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."
Carolin Wais, Partner, Plug and Play, said: "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."
Tom Villinger, Managing Partner at D11Z: "D11Z is quickly becoming an AI native VC and Palma is the foundation for that transformation."
Patrick Krönlein, Principal at D11Z said: "Palma.ai gave our agents governed superpowers. We are both an investor and a customer because the technology solves one of the hardest problems in AI right now: agent governance at scale, across multiple platforms. It also means we can move to any agent platform and take our governance with us. We are excited to support Palma.ai on this next phase of its journey."
The company was co-founded by Patrick Eden (CEO), who previously founded Replex, which exited to Cisco in 2021 with Fortune 100 customers, and has spent his career building and scaling solutions for enterprise. Julian Kolbe (CTO) also co-founded the company, bringing over a decade of experience as a hands-on technical leader building scalable systems for Europe?s fintech and automotive companies.
About Palma.ai
Palma.ai is the enterprise platform that governs AI agents at runtime. Built on the Model Context Protocol, Palma.ai gives every person and agent in an organization a single governed connector, across every AI product they use, that carries the tools, Skills, and policies they are entitled to, enforces them on every call, and records every action in a tamper-evident audit trail. Founded in San Francisco and live since early 2026 by Patrick Eden and Julian Kolbe, Palma.ai is backed by D11Z.Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and Deel. Learn more at palma.ai.
About Plug and Play
Plug and Play is the leading innovation platform, connecting startups, corporations, venture capital firms, universities, and government agencies. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we're present in 60+ locations across five continents. We offer corporate innovation programs and help our corporate partners in every stage of their innovation journey, from education to execution. We also organize startup acceleration programs and have built an in-house VC to drive innovation across multiple industries where we've invested in hundreds of successful companies including Dropbox, Guardant Health, Honey, Lending Club, N26, PayPal, and Rappi.
The funding will help the company bring the platform to more enterprise customers by expanding its go-to-market and engineering teams to meet demand from large organisations rolling out AI agents.
As AI evolves from simple chatbots into a multi-vendor ecosystem of external and in-house agents executing tasks, organisations face a critical blind spot. These agents typically use the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard that acts as the essential plumbing between AI models and internal company data. However, while MCP handles this basic connectivity, it doesn't provide centralised control. Each AI tool still manages its own isolated permissions, leaving IT and security teams without a unified control tower to govern, restrict, or audit what these independent agents are doing. With regulations like the EU AI Act now in force, that gap is a compliance problem as well as a security one.
Palma.ai replaces this sprawl with a single, governed integration layer for every user and AI agent across an organisation, regardless of the AI product they use. Through Palma.ai, administrators centrally define policies, MCP tools, and the Skills that turn those tools into approved, repeatable ways of working, such as standardised CRM updates or financial reporting. These capabilities and guardrails are then applied uniformly across any AI model - whether Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, or custom workflows. Palma.ai enforces these rules at runtime on every call, ensuring agents execute only approved actions while recording every event in a tamper-evident audit trail. This unified approach empowers employees with highly capable, system-connected agents while finally giving security and compliance teams the centralised oversight they require.
Patrick Eden, CEO and co-founder of Palma.ai 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."
Carolin Wais, Partner, Plug and Play, said: "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."
Tom Villinger, Managing Partner at D11Z: "D11Z is quickly becoming an AI native VC and Palma is the foundation for that transformation."
Patrick Krönlein, Principal at D11Z said: "Palma.ai gave our agents governed superpowers. We are both an investor and a customer because the technology solves one of the hardest problems in AI right now: agent governance at scale, across multiple platforms. It also means we can move to any agent platform and take our governance with us. We are excited to support Palma.ai on this next phase of its journey."
The company was co-founded by Patrick Eden (CEO), who previously founded Replex, which exited to Cisco in 2021 with Fortune 100 customers, and has spent his career building and scaling solutions for enterprise. Julian Kolbe (CTO) also co-founded the company, bringing over a decade of experience as a hands-on technical leader building scalable systems for Europe?s fintech and automotive companies.
About Palma.ai
Palma.ai is the enterprise platform that governs AI agents at runtime. Built on the Model Context Protocol, Palma.ai gives every person and agent in an organization a single governed connector, across every AI product they use, that carries the tools, Skills, and policies they are entitled to, enforces them on every call, and records every action in a tamper-evident audit trail. Founded in San Francisco and live since early 2026 by Patrick Eden and Julian Kolbe, Palma.ai is backed by D11Z.Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, and Deel. Learn more at palma.ai.
About Plug and Play
Plug and Play is the leading innovation platform, connecting startups, corporations, venture capital firms, universities, and government agencies. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, we're present in 60+ locations across five continents. We offer corporate innovation programs and help our corporate partners in every stage of their innovation journey, from education to execution. We also organize startup acceleration programs and have built an in-house VC to drive innovation across multiple industries where we've invested in hundreds of successful companies including Dropbox, Guardant Health, Honey, Lending Club, N26, PayPal, and Rappi.
Über "D11Z. Ventures":
D11Z.Ventures is one of Europe's most active early-stage investors. The firm backs founders at pre-seed and seed who are building the defining companies of their categories – in AI infrastructure, physical AI, deep tech, enterprise software, cybersecurity and resilience. From Heilbronn, Munich and Zurich, D11Z operates where Europe's leading AI research meets its industrial base, and invests across the continent from there. Beyond capital, D11Z gives founders access to technology-driven SMEs, established industry leaders and global market champions