Arcade.dev: Helping AI Get Things Done
Our investment in Arcade
Today we at Garuda Ventures are thrilled to announce our partnership with Alex Salazar, Sam Partee, and the entire Arcade.dev team on their journey to help AI builders make AI go beyond just chat and take actions that get work done.
Alex Salazar and Sam Partee, Co-Founders of Arcade.dev
How Do You Enable Agents To Do Anything?
If the ChatGPT moment in late 2022 was the starting gun on this latest technology phase shift being fired, and 2023-2024 was the AI “co-pilot” era, 2025 is the year of the AI Agent (with a frenetic degree of GPU and data center innovation driving it all underneath).
So what exactly is an Agent? Using Anthropic’s definition, AI Agents - in contrast to more deterministic Workflows - are “systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage, maintaining control over how they accomplish tasks.” In the enterprise, agents promise to augment and automate work, and dramatically expand the surface area of work that software can address.
Agents acting autonomously or semi-autonomously to accomplish tasks without significant human oversight is a potential revolution in business application software. But getting agents to achieve this promise isn’t just about having ever-more intelligent frontier models and applying traditional “pre-AI” infrastructure and tooling to harness their power. A new developer tool stack must emerge, to address new problems that arise as builders seek to harness the power of frontier large models.
One of these critical roadblocks is enabling agents to interact in a safe, secure, and reliable manner with the myriad 3rd-party applications or “tools” that they need to, in order to actually take actions in those services. This is a classic example of the new world colliding with the old: the existing paradigm of SaaS applications colliding with the new world of AI agents.
It’s also at its root an authentication problem, one that the special team at Arcade is perfectly suited to address.
Arcade: The AI Agent Tool-Calling Platform for Developers
Arcade.dev is the solution to this problem. They have built an AI tool-calling platform for AI app builders, one that solves the core authentication problem inherent to enabling agents to interact with any third-party product where work gets done, including email, Slack, Github, Twilio, Atlassian, and doing so in the easy and fast way that developers demand. Arcade offers a suite of pre-built connectors and an SDK to connect to any API, dataset, or codebase to unlock the ability for AI developers to quickly help their apps do more than chat, but actually make agents useful in the real world.
Authentication is a gnarly problem in application development, with so many different approaches, protocols, and attack vectors, and the classic tradeoffs between usability and security. It’s an example of a problem that crosses technology paradigms, such as the moment we’re living in right now as the software world embraces AI.
It’s also a problem that the founder/CEO Alex Salazar is uniquely positioned to address, and one that Arpan has spent a lot of time on previously as well. Alex previously was the founder of Stormpath, a developer authentication platform that Okta acquired in 2017, just before the company’s IPO in April of that year. Arpan had the good fortune to work on that acquisition from the Okta side, which is when he first got to know Alex. They stayed close over the years as Okta continued to accelerate post-IPO, with Arpan spending time building out Okta’s M&A program and Alex taking progressively more senior leadership of various key new product initiatives.
As they both moved on from Okta and continued to connect on a regular basis, Alex shared a few ideas he was playing with. He found his way back to authentication and to developer products, but this time for the emerging world of AI agents. The early customer and user feedback was powerful - there was a gaping hole in the new AI developer ecosystem, and Alex was the perfect founder - from a product, team, and developer-centric GTM perspective - to launch this company.
When he introduced us to his co-founder Sam Partee - a special talent in his own right and an AI-native builder - and we saw that he was bringing back Nate Barbettini, one of the star engineers at Stormpath / Okta (and author of a viral explainer video on the OAuth protocol), we knew Garuda had to invest.
Let’s Go!
We are thrilled to be partnering at Day 0 with Alex, Sam, and the entire Arcade team, investing alongside amazing investors like Laude Ventures, Neotribe Ventures, and notable angels like Andy Rachleff, Mike Volpi, and others.
Check out the platform, and reach out to us if you’d like to be connected with the team!
For more on Arcade, check out the company’s website, Github repo, and YouTube video demo with LangGraph.
Brick by Brick is presented by Garuda Ventures. Garuda Ventures is a B2B-focused pre-seed fund that aims to earn the right to be a founder's first call as they get started on their journeys. To learn more, visit https://www.garuda.vc