Palma.ai raises $1.8M to bring governed AI agents to more enterprises

Palma.ai has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding to sell enterprises something they are going to need fast: a way to let AI agents do real work without letting them wander off on their own. The round was led by D11Z, with Plug and Play Ventures, Deel, Scale Now Ventures and angel investors from Cisco and Deel also backing it.

The startup was founded by CEO Patrick Eden and CTO Julian Kolbe. Its pitch is aimed at the awkward middle ground enterprises are now entering, where AI is no longer just answering prompts in a chat window but starting to touch internal systems, external tools and workflows that actually move work along.

Palma.ai sits on top of that mess with a single integration and governance layer. Administrators can set policies, MCP tools and Skills that define approved workflows such as CRM updates or financial reporting, and those controls can apply across Claude, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and custom workflows. At runtime, the platform limits agents to those approved actions and keeps a tamper-evident audit trail of what happened.

That matters because MCP, the Model Context Protocol, makes it easier for AI models to connect to company data, but the permissions still tend to live inside individual tools. Palma.ai is trying to pull that control back into one place so IT and security teams can see and manage what agents are doing, while employees still get access to systems through those agents. The money will go into go-to-market and engineering as the company pushes toward more enterprise customers.