Xpander raises $7.5M for AI agent governance

Xpander, a San Francisco-based AI enablement startup, raised $7.5 million in a seed round led by Pico Venture Partners. Emerge Ventures, Samsung Next and Seedil participated. The company said it will use the funding to expand sales, go-to-market efforts and product development for enterprise customers.

Founded in 2024 by former Amazon Web Services engineers David Twizer (CEO), Moriel Pahima (CTO) and Ran Sheinberg (CPO), Xpander offers a vendor-neutral platform that helps organizations build, deploy and manage AI agents across different environments.

The platform uses a universal agent harness that treats agents as portable workloads. The harness can execute agents across environments and render secure interfaces on demand, providing a single layer for running and managing agent-based applications across products, workflows and data stores.

Xpander’s infrastructure includes governance controls for agent behavior and access and supports integration with multiple models and tools. The company says agents can be moved or managed independently of the underlying model provider while access controls and interface rendering remain consistent.

The startup also developed Omni, described by the company as a forward-deployed engineer that lets teams create agent teammates for employees and supports collaborative multi-agent workflows inside enterprise processes.

“Our experience at AWS inspired us to build a platform to facilitate AI migration and adoption,” Twizer said.

The funding arrives as more businesses test agent-based applications to automate tasks, assist employees and coordinate systems. Xpander targets organizations that require flexibility in model and tool choice alongside centralized governance over agent operations.