Karim Rahme on Metorial's open-source enterprise integration layer for AI agents: 3,600 GitHub stars in 5 weeks

putting together some rigs for the team.

Yeah. Uh well up next we have Mtorial with Kareem the integration layer for AI agents. Welcome to the [music] show. How are you doing Kareem? Thanks for

finally somebody that is integrating agents. Great.

Wow. Almost almost correct.

Okay. What are you doing?

So we basically give your AI agents so your LMS access to these apps and data sources. So anything from your Gmail to your SAP to your Salesforce.

Okay. I was just we we were just talking to somebody. Oh, uh Jason Frerieded, right? He was saying that OpenAI just wound up building a base camp integration out of nowhere one day. They just kind of told him, "Hey, it's live now. You didn't have to do anything." Uh is that not happening fast enough? Like in what scenario would I need your service if all of the it feels like there's a massive war going on between the the the LLMs? They all want to do the integrations as fast as possible. How is this going to play out? I mean actually one of the OpenAI uh member of technical staff reached out to us for our product. So

okay this makes sense.

There's that. But basically one way to think about this is right first of all open AI won't give you AI integrations for the other providers. People still want to be using Gemini. They want to be using Anthropic or any of these others. So we basically provide you with the developer tooling to use any LLM model with any AI integration. And it's not just the integrations. It's also these things like access control, right? Because these Fortune 500s can't just unleash an LLM with access to whatever your Salesforce, SAP, to all the members in their organization. They need to think very concretely about who has secure access to which models and which data sources.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Um,

what were you doing? What were you doing before this?

So, I just graduated from NYU Abu Dhabi uh in May and before that I ran a different Abu Dhabi based ticketing startup for around three and a half years.

Oh, that's cool.

Very, very cool. Um what uh what's traction been like? You said a member of the technical staff at OpenAI [laughter] reached out.

That that's that's a development from yesterday. So not too much not too many updates on that. But we are open source with over 3,600 GitHub stars and we have uh close to thousand weekly active users uh just since launching around 5 weeks ago. And then we're also in final stage discussions with some Fortune 500s and unicorns who will deploy this across the organization.

[laughter]

Good good side effects regress organizations with 80,000 100,000 members

is MCP complimentary competitive substitutive like how does MCP fit into this? So here's so here's how we think about it, right? So LLMs 10 years from now will still need access to apps and data sources with access control. Yeah, right now the standard for that is MCP. So we basically have this middleware layer translating between our platform and MCP.

But if the standard changes a year from now, we just switch to the new standard, right? Cuz the long-term bet here is not an MCP. I think that's what a lot of these other companies are getting wrong where they're building 100% on top of MCP but they don't actually think about what these companies need. They're just kind of following the hype train of oh MCP is the next cool big thing which we are not fully in agreeing agree with.

Take me through sort of like the top five agent categories that are interesting to you. I imagine coding agents are probably at the top. Maybe knowledge retrieval, deep research agents, maybe

Yeah, we don't actually think about that.

Okay. uh we we are completely unopinionated about how you build your agent. We just provide you with the integrations. Sure. Right. Because every agent will need to do read and write operations on these apps and data sources. And if we can take a tax on that, you figure out how big the market is.

Yeah. Uh is there uh I I mean I guess to flip the question around just what uh what agentic capabilities are you excited to see out in the world in 2026? Honestly, um I really like seeing all these new verticals where basically people just what what do what do they call them? Those full stack AI native firms where free people go in there use these LM capabilities and these for example legal agents or healthcare agents to compete with

unicorns or large established players. I think that's really exciting. You kind of got this Goliath story there.

Okay. So, so walk me through that. If I'm a lawyer and I'm leaving my firm to start an AI native law firm, um, I might buy some AI legal SAS, but I also might need to integrate with some more niche tools or some more legacy tools. Um, are you the firm that I would go to to do those integrations for me?

Yeah, we basically want to become the substrate for your integrations. So really long term, we want to have a sort of Oracle story here. how how similar to how Oracle became the substrate for enterprise databases

and then sold those extra things like enterprise Java etc on top we want to be the substrate for the integration layer and the access control layer and then add these additional things like the workflow builders or also hosting your agents right so that's kind of the long-term vision here

I always like to take the temperature on YC folks on like what uh what's breaking out in their supply chain what's a what's a tool or company or service or technology technology that you are leveraging to build this company that uh you're you're particularly thankful for.

See this might surprise you but kind of compared to a lot of other people we are very OG software engineers and what I mean by that is we my co-founder and I have been have had formal computer science education for over 11 years.

Sure. So we met in Austrian technical high school at 14 years old for basically computer science and that really allows us to think about first principles. So in terms of building out our entire infrastructure ourselves thinking about the API designer from scratch and we don't really use that many tools that are available out of the market right now because what we find is that they speed up the process a little bit but we have been doing it for so long that we can just do it better ourselves. So really we invented a lot of new things here as well which kind of the other competitors who are mostly only VIP coding can't even do with their

you need you need to get an organic certification on the website you know like [laughter] uh this is organic code zero

you can get the Austrian armor eagle [laughter] love it uh let me guess the round's already done

yes very fast actually wrapped up in around 5 days

5 days I knew it knew it

oh

I knew it uh congratulations love uh yeah loved hearing how you're you know thinking about the opportunity and and how opinionated you are. So congrats on all all the progress. Excited to follow on. Uh I'm I'm sure uh I'm sure you'll be back on the show soon.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you so much.

Have a good rest of your day.

Before bringing our next guest, let me tell you about Finn.AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel with Finn.ai. AI and we have Phillip from Crunched. What a great name for an AI analyst for an AI Excel analyst for Excel power users. Uh just for power users.

Have you ever be Have you ever been an Excel power user?

You always had to have one hand on the mouse. You were never just on the keyboards guy.

Always had one. Very soft. Very soft.

I can I can I can hear Andrew Reed losing respect from you all the way from here. [laughter]

He's getting cooked.

All the way from uh the valley. Um indeed well he is in the re room waiting