Obot AI, an open-source software company building enterprise-ready platforms for the emerging Model Context Protocol standard, said today it has raised $35 million in a seed funding round co-led by Mayfield Fund and Nexus Venture Partners.

The company said it intends to use the new capital to accelerate the development of its open-source projects, including Obot MCP Gateway and Nanobot MCP Agent Framework, and grow its engineering and product teams.

Model Context Protocol, or MCP for short, is an emerging open-source standard released by AI model developer Anthropic PBC in late 2024. It acts as a universal interface for connecting large language models with external tools and data sources. MCP enables AI models and agents to effectively interact with third-party software.

Launched in 2025, the Obot MCP Gateway provides enterprise developers and information technology teams with a unified, open-source solution for controlling and managing the security of MCP servers and MCP-enabled AI solutions.

“The MCP standard is reshaping how organizations adopt AI,” said Chief Executive Sheng Liang. “But without a standard platform, companies struggle with fragmentation, governance and integration challenges.”

As companies and developers build and integrate more AI-enabled software, IT teams must come to terms with the challenge of providing access to software tools and data sources while also organizing and securing that access.

Obot said the MCP Gateway assists IT teams by giving organizations a clear management console where they can control and secure standardized connections. Currently, that’s difficult without a regime or process because discovery, documentation and security for the emerging standard is fragmented and difficult to control.

MCP Gateway offers centralized control for IT teams, universal hosting for MCP, secure proxies and automated documentation and discovery for enhanced transparency. Users need only generate URLs to connect MCPs to their AI clients, or interact with them directly through Obot’s chat.

“Enterprises urgently need a way to unlock the value of AI assistants while ensuring governance, security, and trust,” said Ursheet Parikh, partner at Mayfield Fund. “Obot AI’s MCP Platform is the missing piece of enterprise infrastructure, and we’re thrilled to support Sheng and his team as they bring this vision to life.”

Obot’s Nanobot technology is a comprehensive AI agent framework built around MCP, enabling developers to quickly prototype and deploy sophisticated AI agents that can connect to external tools and data. The framework also supports MCP-UI, an experimental extension to MCP that enables AI agents to render active user interfaces and visual components. Using MCP-UI, developers can embed interactive web experiences directly within conversational AI applications.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer