StartupY Combinator (S25)
Alter
Privileged access management for AI agents, with per-end-user identity instead of one shared key.
Alter is a credential proxy that gives multi-user agents per-end-user identity and access control. Its founders describe the problem as agents that connect "with one shared API key, so the agent can do anything that the key can do." The site now presents Alter as privileged access management for AI agents. Y Combinator S25.
Neighbours in the directory
New York, NY · Est. 2023
Red-teaming and robustness for AI agents.
Haize Labs stress-tests agents with automated adversarial attacks — prompt injection, tool misuse, unsafe actions — and ships an SDK for continuous safety evaluation in CI.
San Francisco, CA · Est. 2024
Automated evaluation and guardrails for LLM systems.
Patronus AI scores outputs against policy and business criteria in CI and production, catching regressions before users do — 'unit tests for AI'.
United States
Human approval and context engineering for agents.
HumanLayer builds tooling for human-in-the-loop agent workflows and authored '12-Factor Agents' — the widely-cited methodology for building production harnesses. Now focused on agentic code review tooling.
Connections
Relations from the Harness Hub knowledge graph, as charted in the State of Harness reports.
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Sources
Verified Oct 29, 2026