Keycard Named to CB Insights AI 100 — Identity Platform for AI Agents Joins 2026 Cohort (May 5, 2026)

Keycard, the New York-based identity-and-access platform for autonomous AI agents, was named to CB Insights' tenth annual AI 100 on May 5, 2026 — the analyst firm's list of the 100 most promising private AI companies in the world. The recognition lands roughly seven months after Keycard exited stealth with a $38 million seed-and-Series A round, and three months after it acquired Anchor.dev to govern autonomous coding agents.

What Happened

CB Insights unveiled the 2026 AI 100 cohort on May 5, with Keycard's inclusion confirmed in a press release dated May 6, 2026. The list was selected from more than 13,000 applicants using CB Insights' proprietary scoring across deal activity, partnerships, team strength, investor strength, headcount growth, and the firm's commercial maturity and Mosaic scores. CB Insights flagged this year's cohort as defined by "proof of real traction outside a demo environment," with a fifth of the 100 winners headquartered outside the United States.

Keycard sits squarely in one of the cohort's hottest sub-categories: agent infrastructure. The company's pitch is that the same patterns that secured human users — OAuth, RBAC, audit logs — break down when the "user" is an autonomous coding agent that issues thousands of API calls per task. Keycard's platform issues per-action, task-scoped credentials to agents, enforces policy at runtime, and produces a complete audit trail of every API call, CLI command, or generated tool the agent invokes.

Key Details

• Selected from 13,000+ applicants — Keycard is one of 100 companies named to CB Insights' 2026 AI 100 list, with a winning rate of under 1%.
• Founded in 2025 by ex-Snyk and ex-Auth0 leaders — co-founders Ian Livingstone and Matthew Creager built Snyk's platform engineering and developer experience divisions; Jared Hanson was Chief Architect at Auth0 (post-Okta) and the creator of Passport.js, the most popular Node.js authentication framework.
• $38M raised from a16z, boldstart and Acrew — Keycard exited stealth in October 2025 with a combined seed and Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Boldstart Ventures and Acrew Capital co-investing.
• Anchor.dev acquisition (Feb 2026) — Keycard acquired security-certificate-management startup Anchor.dev, founded by ex-Cloudflare/GitHub/Heroku engineers Wesley Beary and Ben Burkert, to extend per-action governance to autonomous coding agents.
• CRN Top 10 Cloud Computing Startup to Watch (Jan 2026) — Keycard was previously named one of the 10 cloud-computing startups to watch in 2026 by CRN.

What Developers and Users Are Saying

Reaction on Hacker News and X has zeroed in on the same thesis that drove the AI 100 selection: traditional human-centric IAM doesn't scale to agents. Threads on r/devops and r/programming repeatedly cite the audit-trail problem — "my Claude Code agent just made 600 API calls, where do I look?" — as the use case Keycard is built for. Skeptics on Hacker News have asked whether agent identity is a real new category or a feature that incumbent identity vendors (Okta, Auth0, WorkOS) will absorb; supporters point to Keycard's MCP-native design and the Anchor.dev integration as evidence that agent-first companies will outpace bolt-on solutions.

What This Means for Developers

Two practical takeaways for engineering teams shipping AI agents in 2026. First: agent identity is now a recognised primitive — the AI 100 listing alongside Keycard, Straiker, and 7AI signals that VCs and analysts treat it as a distinct category, not a feature. Second: if your team is building autonomous coding agents, expect security and platform teams to start asking who issued the token an agent used, what scope it had, and whether every call was logged — questions Keycard's category is designed to answer.

What's Next

Keycard has not announced new pricing or product launches alongside the AI 100 inclusion, but the company's blog signals heavy investment in MCP-native access controls and per-tool scoping for autonomous coding agents. The Anchor.dev integration roadmap and an expanded SDK lineup for popular agent frameworks are expected through Q3 2026. CB Insights has scheduled a public webinar on the 2026 AI 100 cohort on May 12, 2026.

Sources

• Manila Times — Keycard Named One of the Most Innovative AI Startups by CB Insights (May 6, 2026)
• TipRanks — Keycard Named to CB Insights AI 100 as It Scales Identity Platform for AI Agents
• CB Insights — Meet the 2026 AI 100 (official briefing)
• Keycard Blog — "Coding Agents Are Ungovernable, We're Fixing That" (Feb 10, 2026)
• GlobeNewswire — Keycard launches with $38M from a16z, Boldstart, Acrew (Oct 21, 2025)
• SiliconANGLE — AI agent identity startup Keycard acquires Anchor.dev (Feb 10, 2026)