Arcade.dev: Making AI Agents Work—Securely

If you’ve ever used agentic AI, or merely seen online demos of AI agents like Operator or Manus, you can’t help but to be impressed by its potential to do entirely autonomously what takes us humans hours to do ourselves. But while the idea of setting an AI agent to task and walking away is attractive, you may have noticed that there is still a problem with that idea: Many of the tasks we would like agents to do for us require identity verification at various stages, whether it is a consumer agent logging into gmail, or an enterprise agent accessing customer order data. Whenever authentication is required, humans are needed back in the loop, creating awkward and time-consuming bottlenecks.

To solve this problem, old friends and new solutions come together again as Neotribe doubles down on its investment in AI agent infrastructure startup Arcade.dev, led by former Neotribe partner Alex Salazar and former Redis AI engineering lead Sam Partee. Our relationship with Alex goes back to Kittu’s time at New Enterprise Associates. NEA was an early investor in Alex’s cloud user authentication firm Stormpath, which later became part of Okta. After leaving Okta, we saw an opportunity to leverage Alex’s considerable talents at Neotribe. We broke bread, drank wine, and debated for hours about the future of AI. In Alex’s own words:

“Neotribe shaped my trajectory in powerful ways. Being at the bleeding edge of venture gave me unprecedented insight into where AI research and technology were heading. I connected with top AI talent, including Sam, my eventual co-founder, while he led AI engineering at Redis. Sam became my go-to for AI diligence.”

Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur, however! When generative AI came bursting on the scene, Alex saw the coming need for secure authentication of AI agents, and Neotribe knew that there was nobody better to build it than Alex:

“When GPT-3.5 dropped, it hit me viscerally—I knew immediately that LLMs would become the next foundational platform, similar to how EC2 and S3 became the backbone of cloud computing. Within months, we witnessed a surge of companies building on LLMs, but most were just thin wrappers, not true breakthroughs. What began as a frustration about this grew into a classic founder moment—I realized that I needed to build the company I was searching to fund. So I jumped back in.”

When Alex came forward with his idea, Neotribe wrote the first check—even before the company had a name. That name, and that idea, of course, became Arcade, the industry's first authenticated tool-calling platform for Agentic AI. Arcade solves the fundamental problem of authentication of AI agents so that agents can interact with enterprise and consumer services like Gmail, Slack, GitHub, and Salesforce, securely using the login credentials of the human workers the agents assist. To do this, Arcade provides developers with hundreds of pre-built “agent tools” as well as a software development kit for customized integration with any API, data, logic, or system—in just minutes.

Only a year after its inception, Arcade is already helping engineers build production-ready AI agents that manage support tickets, schedule meetings, send emails, update CRM records, and coordinate cross-system workflows in financial services, healthcare, and technology sectors.

Joining Alex in this venture is Arcade co-founder and CTO Sam Partee, a talented machine learning engineer who previously led applied AI engineering at real-time data platform Redis. Last week Arcade announced its $12 million dollar formal seed round, which Neotribe is proud to be a part of, expanding our investment in Arcade and reaffirming our support of Alex and Sam.

Although we’ve already been together for years in a sense, it is an honor to formally “welcome” Arcade to the Neotribe family. Please join us in celebrating this milestone in our work together, and this important advance in building the future of agentic AI for enterprise. We could not be more optimistic about the future of Arcade.dev.