Why Obot AI matters
Obot AI, formerly Acorn Labs, raises a $35M seed round co-led by Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners in September 2025 to build a control plane between agents and MCP servers. The founders, including Sheng Liang and Darren Shepherd, previously built Rancher Labs, which SUSE acquired in 2020. Its MIT-licensed obot and nanobot repositories hold about 1,000 and 1,300 GitHub stars as of September 2026.
The numberRaised a $35M seed round co-led by Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners in September 2025
On The Agentic 80
Listed under Agent frameworks and infrastructure. What agents are built on: orchestration, tools, memory, evals, sandboxes.
Quick answers
- What does Obot AI do?
- Open source MCP gateway and governance platform that controls what AI agents and tools can access. Obot AI, formerly Acorn Labs, raises a $35M seed round co-led by Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners in September 2025 to build a control plane between agents and MCP servers.
- What AI capabilities does Obot AI offer?
- Obot AI offers an open source MCP gateway that controls which tools, data sources, and actions AI agents can use. Business users and administrators set access policies, review agent activity, and connect approved enterprise systems through the gateway. Nanobot is its agent product that runs under that governance layer, so teams can deploy agents with managed tool access rather than unmanaged connections.
- Why is Obot AI on The Agentic 80?
- Obot AI is listed under Agent frameworks and infrastructure. What agents are built on: orchestration, tools, memory, evals, sandboxes. Raised a $35M seed round co-led by Mayfield and Nexus Venture Partners in September 2025.
- Where is Obot AI based, and who owns it?
- Obot AI is based in Cupertino, CA, was founded in 2022 and is private, Seed.