Openlayer gives regulated enterprises one place to test, monitor and govern their AI models, agents and systems. Risk, compliance and engineering teams use it to find the AI in use across the business, check that it behaves as intended before and after release, control live model traffic and produce the evidence regulators ask for.
The platform is organised in layers that follow an AI system from discovery to production, with a Gateway acting as “the enforcement point” for every model call.
At A Glance
| Vendor | Openlayer |
|---|---|
| Category | AI governance and observability platform |
| Identities covered | AI models, agents, systems and API keys |
| Deployment | Customer VPC or on-premises (Enterprise plan) |
| Agentic AI | Agent workflow traces and tests for unauthorised tool calls |
| Customers | Amdocs, Telefónica, eBay, Sun Life, DIRECTV |
| Certifications | SOC 2 Type II, GDPR compliant |
| Market classification | AI Governance & Compliance; also Agentic AI Identity |
What Openlayer Does
Enterprises in financial services, telecoms, healthcare and other regulated sectors are putting AI into production faster than they can track it. Some of it is shadow AI that nobody registered, and much of it has no record of how it was tested or what it costs. Regulators expect that evidence.
Openlayer covers that lifecycle in one product: discovery finds AI in use, a registry records each system with a risk tier, testing and observability check behaviour, guardrails act on live traffic, compliance maps the evidence to frameworks and cost controls track spending.
Products
Discovery And Registration
Governance teams start here to build an organisation wide inventory of AI, with shadow AI detected automatically. Each system goes into a central registry through custom intake forms, with model and dataset versioning and a risk tier.
Testing And Evaluation
Engineering teams check models and agents against more than 175 ready-made evals, custom metrics and regression tests that run in CI/CD. Root cause analysis helps explain failures, and the testing library includes a check for unauthorised tool calls by agents.
Observability And Monitoring
Once a system is live, Openlayer traces prompts, responses and tool calls and evaluates production traffic continuously, so drift and failures surface without waiting for a complaint.
Security, Guardrails And Compliance
Security teams apply guardrails that detect and redact PII, defend against prompt injection and jailbreaks and enforce policy on live traffic. Compliance teams then map the test, monitoring and guardrail evidence to regulatory frameworks and produce audit ready reports from it.
Cost Controls And Gateway
The Gateway is “one place to route, cap, and control every model call”. Finance and platform teams set hard spending limits by key, project, team, model or provider, disable keys directly, and route traffic across approved providers based on availability, performance, cost or policy.
How It Works
Openlayer can run in the customer’s own VPC with no external network connections, or on-premises on the Enterprise plan. Data at rest is encrypted with AES-256.
| Component | What it does |
|---|---|
| Gateway | Captures every LLM call at the network level and routes it through one point of control. Most teams point existing traffic through it rather than changing application code. |
| Tracing | OpenTelemetry traces arrive over OTLP, in protobuf over HTTPS, and are converted into Openlayer’s own trace format. The LangChain integration uses callbacks to publish each LLM or chain call with latency, token counts and cost estimates. |
Identities And Systems Covered
| AI models | Registration, versioning, testing and monitoring. |
|---|---|
| AI agents | Workflow traces covering handoff, tool and guardrail steps. |
| API keys | Budgets, caps and disabling through the Gateway. |
| Users and teams | Gateway traffic attributed to applications, teams and users. |
| Shadow AI | Unregistered AI found by automatic detection. |
Integrations
| Area | Integrations |
|---|---|
| Source control | Git |
| Telemetry and data | OpenTelemetry, Snowflake |
| Agent frameworks | LangChain, Microsoft Agent Framework |
Company Background
| Founded | 2021, by Gabriel Bayomi, Vikas Nair and Rishab Ramanathan, in the Y Combinator Summer 2021 batch. |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | San Francisco, United States. |
| Leadership | Gabriel Bayomi (co-founder and CEO), Vikas Nair (co-founder and CPO), Rishab Ramanathan (co-founder and CTO). |
| Funding | A reported $14.5 million Series A in May 2025 led by Race Capital, with KPN, Y Combinator, NXTP, Mindset, Quiet Capital and Telefónica participating, following a $4.8 million seed round. |
Note: This overview is compiled from Openlayer’s publicly available information as of 4 November 2026. It is provided for information only. NHI Mgmt Group does not endorse any vendor, and nothing on this page represents the opinions of NHI Mgmt Group.