Guild AI raises $44M to build an enterprise agent control plane — think GitHub but for AI agents

painted an interesting picture of Palmer and uh a nice graphic in the header. Well, without further ado, let's bring in our nest next guest. We have James from Guild. How you doing, James? What's happening? Doing great. Thanks for having me on. Welcome to the show.

Since it's your first time, please introduce yourself and the company. Sure. Sure. I'm James Everingham, the CEO of Guild AI, uh, you know, building a agent control plane. Okay. Uh, this is important because my agents are out of control. Yeah. Yeah. I was very They're going to get worse. We're here for you. Yes.

I was very interested in orchestration, what's happening with Gas Town, some of the stuff we've been seeing with Open Claw. Um, what how long you've been working on this and then where do you think uh like what do you think the correct user interface the the correct user experience paradigm is? Yeah, absolutely.

So, I think you know I think you just wrote Yeah, I was reading your post about the uh 2026 being the year of agents and orchestration and first off completely agree with that.

Um, and what we're seeing though is once you start getting these agents in your infrastructure and they're starting to come in pretty pretty heavily into a lot of companies, the next problem becomes controlling these things. You know, it's like it's like gremlins.

You know, the first one's fine until they start multiplying and taking over and pulling levers in your infrastructure. You know, they can cause a little chaos. So, what we have built is an infrastructure layer that um provides governance and control around these.

you know, you can centralize them, you can run them efficiently, you can give them and control what they have access to and what they don't. Um, you need observability in order to figure out what they did, what they touched, and you know, who can get access to configuring them. So, that's where we're coming in.

Um, we ran into this problem. A lot of us came from meta. We were working on the developer infrastructure teams and we were working on getting the engineers to use agents to embed into the infrastructure.

And well, we got that to work and that basically highlighted the next problem is like, okay, now you have lots of these. We think there'll be more than 10. We think you'll have thousands of these in your infrastructure at some point.

Um, then suddenly, you know, security pops up and if you're in a regulated business, compliance pops up and you need you need a layer to control this. Agents are non-deterministic and you need a deterministic layer if you're going to have a stable infro layer. Mhm. How much is uh just costbenefit important these days?

Uh I've seen crazy bills from people that are orchestrating a ton of agents and uh you know it starts to creep up on you like wait you spent how much on tokens for that to-do app? Like I don't know if that was a good trade.

Uh, and I imagine that in the enterprise if you're talking about deploying fleets of agents to hundreds or thousands of employees, you could be looking at a really big inference bill and ma monitoring that seems important too. But is that something that is just too abstract for clients to demand at this point?

Not at all.

That's actually one of the top requests we're seeing like you know some of the customers that were engaging with early like um literally one of them had this problem is they had a monthly budget and you know it's built for single player so that uh engineers were off running these on on you know on a separated server or on their laptop.

One engineer blew through their entire budget in 12 hours and they didn't know.

So, you know, building a centralized place where you can put circuit breakers and say, "Hey, you know, like turn this thing off if it gets too hungry or, you know, being able to report and understand where your spend is, but not just like where the spend is, it's like what am I getting for that spend and like you need to be able to measure the impact of these as well.

I feel like you're at the tip of the spear. What type of uh companies are being most aggressive about adopting fleets of AI agents these days? Yeah, you know, it's it's the timing is really interesting because we're seeing like many of the customers are now just leaning into it.

It's like, you know, last year it was like experimentation. We've got one agent. It's a really interesting uh uh you know, uh demonstration or example, but now they're all starting to scale. So, we've been talking with small companies and large companies.

And interestingly, they all seem to be at this same phase where we've now figured out that, you know, the models are powerful enough to operate tools and to be able to like be part of our infrastructure. So, um, we're seeing it across the board. It seems to be hitting all these companies at once. Okay.

So, evenly distributed across scale and stage. What about industry? Are there particular industries that are more rapidly adopting fleets of AI agents? Yeah, I think that there is some little bit of differentiation there.

Of course, you know, some of the more, you know, the companies that are a little more tech forward, you know, they map up to what we traditionally would look at as the early adopters and the lagards, it's the same. So, the highly regulated businesses are slower by design because they, you know, they can't take risk.

And one way to think about it is the the companies that we see really leaning into this is look, you know, there's a lot of pressure for competition and being able to uh to to move faster right now. So I think that the the the calculus between risk and the consequences of failure has changed.

People are willing to take on a little more risk and try these things. Um but you know, our aim is to allow them to move fast while still reducing that risk in their infrastructure. What kind of what kind of tension is there between um like I can imagine a world where guild provides all of the enterprise infrastructure.

So somebody can just bring somebody can create an agent and uh you know effectively uh give it access to guild and that gives it access to the enterprise but a lot of companies will want to actually own the full stack. How do you think about that uh tension uh as well as opportunity?

Yeah, I think well one I think it's an opportunity. Uh right now what we're seeing is that a lot of companies are off building sort of like sort of small versions of this internally and uh it's not their core competence. They don't want to build it. They don't want to maintain it over time. It's not going to get better.

Um they don't have the specialized expertise to do it well.

Um so what we think is that companies are really open to using this as a service and one thing that's important is that you know being vendor neutral and and you know model neutral is also important because people don't want to be locked into one vendor because the competition right now is things are you know they're leaprogging each other and they're hopping from model to model.

So you know vendor neutrality is also important here. Totally. What about the types of activities, the types of use cases for fleets of agents uh that you're seeing?

I'm interested to know about uh this there's a lot of there's a lot of narrative around like oh you're just going to like go vibe code your CRM and like rip out that legacy software.

Uh but it just feels like with you know agents you're so much more likely to just go pull your roadmap forward and go deliver more value for your customers. Maybe you'll go ask for a contact renegotiation, but what are you actually seeing? Yeah, sure.

So, the interesting thing is like people we're seeing the most innovative agents come from our customers and not ones that we thought of. I like some of the favorite ones that I've seen so far is this onboarding agent. There was an agent that made the codebase sentient.

And so instead of saying, "Hey, I want to check out these files," you can say, "Uh, check out this feature. " And it would say, "Oh, that's these files. Would you like a system diagram? Sure. And we paint you a system diagram. Do you want to know the history? And you could have a conversation with it.

Um, another one or or we're seeing these agents. And by the way, agents can get executed not just by a person, but by a tool and by an event.

So uh we had a risk analysis agent that when it gets pulled like when a the CI/CD system pulls from source it would analyze the risk to have how likely is this diff going to take the system down and it can let lowrisk diffs go through and and high-risk ones stop.

So things like this can help eliminate holiday code freeze of the codebase. Um there so those are a few um and they can expand way outside of just development they can go into all of these uh different workflows. Uh anywhere where there's an integration prompts and evals you can you can make use of this.

We have one in ours that like doesn't allow duplicate bugs to happen. So books into git fires an event the agent goes and says this is a duplicate bug already. It'll just mark it.

Um, with the guild system though, we were able to just go in and natural language interface just say, "Hey, don't make it make it so it's not possible for duplicate bugs to exist in our company.

" And it just went and did it behind the scenes, installed the agent, set it up, right, and boom, like that wasn't possible for any engineers in the company. Talk to me about where Guild sits in a world where I build a product that is effectively a fleet of agents.

Maybe you call me a rapper, whatever, but my customers love the product which is heavily agentic. I'm using Guild, your product to orchestrate and then I want to vend that into a company. Am I like white labeling you? Am I using you internally and then my customer doesn't know?

Are they going to be wanting to use Guild on their side? Like what's the where do you fit in that stack? Yeah. So one of the things that we found is that like a a way for these agents to be for for engineers and for companies to learn how to use these is by like looking at them and and seeing it.

So like we have something we call agent hub. Okay. An agent hub will be a public surface. So companies can have internal agents that are private but they can also push them externally and they can be a series of agents that work together.

We look a lot like GitHub in that way where you can go you can find agents right on the surface that might work for you.

These could be distributed by third parties or people that are building agents as products and within minutes they can just authorize set up a workspace click and boom have these things working in their in their workspace. So we're big open source pe believers. We've we've been in that space our entire career.

So, you know, there is an aspect of that that we're bringing to this agent marketplace. Very cool. Well, uh, we want to ring the gong for you. How much did you raise? Oh, thank you. Yeah, we uh it it's kind of tough following that $4 billion one that you just announced, but you know, we will go. We raised 44 million.

Um, uh, it's our sec it's our second round. Apologies. It was 30 million plus 14 in our seed. We raised both of these rounds within 4 months. That's incredible. who who participated? Yeah. Any like companies I might have heard of involved? Um uh yeah, sure. Like uh our lead investor was Google Ventures.

There so GV uh they read they um we have NFX involved. We had a Kla Ventures came in this round. Um Scribble Ventures. Fantastic. Acrew Capital Web Investment Network. Amazing. I think I got them. I think I got them all. You you will have missed one and that one person will hold a grudge against you forever.

That's a great that's a great lineup. The rule of lists. You always forget one. It'll probably be the most the biggest one too, right? But thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us. We'll talk to you for having me. You too. Let me tell you about public. com investing for those that take it seriously.

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