I'm excited to finally be able to talk about our investment in Arcade.dev, founded by Alex Salazar and Sam Partee. Arcade is tackling the most fundamental blocker to practical AI deployment in the enterprise: secure and seamless authentication for AI agents.

The rise of agentic AI has unleashed an explosion of innovation, but also a new class of problems that AI upstarts just aren't equipped to solve. It has been great fun to see the pioneering AI-first entrepreneurs I've invested in do things that we never imagined with applications, but getting these things to work together takes a different type of brilliance. LLMs are now sophisticated enough to handle complex tasks, but they still lack the ability to securely interact with real-world systems as agents. And that's a big problem for companies looking to leverage new AI agents to streamline their operations, optimize their efforts, and open new opportunities.

Businesses need secure, reliable ways to integrate AI into their existing systems. It doesn't matter how shiny and cool a new agent is if it can't take action. When it comes to enterprise, agents have an auth problem.

That's where Arcade comes in. They launched yesterday — covered by TechCrunch — with a tool-calling platform that enables AI agents to interact securely with the enterprise systems we use every day — Slack, Gmail, Salesforce, Microsoft Office, you name it.

Arcade is not the first startup to enable AI to call tools, but it is the only startup to do it through authentication. This has made it simpler than ever before for developers to build powerful agents that can do real work at enterprise scale. As both developer and enterprise adoption continue to accelerate, Arcade is already setting the standard for how AI plugs into real-world business operations. They've only just emerged from stealth and are already transforming agents from playthings into fully operational systems that drive material value to both developers and enterprises.

The skills needed to pull this off are specialized, rare, and in high-demand. Arcade has managed to build a world-class team that understands the authentication problem space at a root level.

Alex Salazar has an incredible ability to identify core opportunities early. I saw it firsthand while working closely with Alex as an investor and board member of Stormpath, where he built the first auth API for developers. (Stormpath was acquired by Okta, where Alex led their developer products and scaled them to 25% of total bookings). His co-founder, Sam, is one of the strongest engineers working in AI today, having deployed over a hundred LLM-based applications at Redis and developed SmartSim, a tool connecting the world's fastest supercomputers with ML infrastructure.

Together, they've brought together the smartest people in the auth space, people who could go anywhere but have chosen to solve this problem because they can see the scale of its impact. This team has the product, intellectual heft, and tenacity to go all the way. Anyone who knows Alex and Sam like I do will attest to their energy to be able to keep up with the pace of the industry.

Yesterday, Arcade shot out of the gate with a library of 148 tool integrations, and have already demonstrated significantly higher tool accuracy than their nearest competitors. I'm impressed, but unsurprised. Arcade is about to do for agents what Okta did for auth, becoming the connective tissue of every modern enterprise technology stack.

Big congratulations to Alex, Sam, and team on this launch. Countless businesses will be made stronger by the work that you do. All of us at Laude are thrilled to be your partners on this ride.

If you're a founder tackling deep technical challenges, we'd love to hear from you: hello@laude.vc