Seed round · 2026
Open Capability
Protocol.
The neutral standard for how autonomous agents discover, evaluate, and adopt the software, models, and data their enterprises run on.
OCP
CONFIDENTIAL · FOR DISCUSSION
The shift

Software is no longer
bought by humans alone.

Inside every large enterprise, agents have started to evaluate APIs, test models, swap datasets, and pull in open-source packages — without a human in the loop on each call.
~$650B
Annual enterprise spend on software, APIs, models, and data — the surface agents now act on.
11×
Increase in agent-initiated tool calls observed at enterprise pilots in the last 12 months.
0
Standardized records of what was evaluated, by whom, and on whose authority.
Every adoption raises the same questions

Each time an agent reaches
for a capability, eight things
must be answered.

01
What was requested?
INTENT
02
By whom, on whose authority?
IDENTITY
03
For what purpose?
JUSTIFICATION
04
With what permissions?
SCOPE
05
Under what policy?
CONSTRAINTS
06
At what cost?
BUDGET
07
With what evidence?
EVALUATION
08
And what was decided?
DECISION
The adjacent layers

Procurement, agent platforms,
and MCP each solve one slice.

Procurement
Manages the human buying workflow once a vendor is already in motion — POs, contracts, sourcing.
Misses: the agent's autonomous evaluation that happens before — and after — a vendor is selected.
Agent platforms
Govern their own runtimes — what their agents can do inside their walled environment.
Misses: a portable record an enterprise can carry across vendors, clouds, and frameworks.
MCP & tool calls
Tell agents how to connect to a tool — the wire-level handshake.
Misses: evaluation, authorization, constraints, approval, and audit. The governance question.
The gap

None of them is the neutral
governance layer.

Procurement is buyer-side. Agent platforms are runtime-side. MCP is wire-side. No single standard records what the enterprise asked for, what was tested, what was permitted, and what was decided — in a portable, auditable form that travels across all three.

Pattern

Standards always emerge where many
parties must trust one record.

Domain
Standard
What it gave the ecosystem
Banking
cross-border payments
ISO 20022
since 2004
A shared message format that lets banks, regulators, and vendors interoperate without bilateral translation.
Data pipelines
lineage & observability
OpenLineage
since 2021
A portable record of how data was produced — adopted across warehouses, orchestrators, and BI tools.
Open source
software supply chain
SPDX / SBOM
since 2010
A common bill of materials so enterprises can ingest packages they didn't author with confidence.

Agent-led adoption is the next domain that needs this — and the window to define it is open right now.

Open Capability Protocol

A portable record of
agent-led adoption
shared across vendors, runtimes, and audits.

Open specification Vendor-neutral Machine-signable Policy-aware Audit-ready Composable with MCP, OAuth, OIDC, OPA

Not a runtime. Not a marketplace. A document — and the schema that lets every system in the chain read, write, and trust it.

One capability request

A capability request, in one document.

// OCP/0.1
capability_request
id: ocp-2026-04-7c4e9a · status: APPROVED
intent
evaluate & adopt → fraud-scoring API for checkout flow
requested_by
agent: finops-broker/v3.2 · principal: ops-team@firm
capability
vendor: alt-risk.ai · sku: score-v4 · region: eu-west
scope
read:transactions · write:scores · pii:hashed-only
budget
$8,400 / 30d evaluation · hard cap enforced
policy
eu-data-residency · soc2-required · fallback-to: incumbent-v2
evaluation
benchmark suite passed (12/12) · latency p99: 78ms · cost/1k: $0.91
approvers
policy-engine ✓ · ciso-delegate ✓ · finance-bot ✓
decision
ADOPT — 90-day pilot, auto-renew gated on weekly evals
Lifecycle

OCP governs the full arc — not
just the moment of connection.

01
Discover
AGENT
Finds candidate capabilities matching its intent.
02
Request
AGENT → ENTERPRISE
Files a scoped, signed capability_request.
03
Authorize
POLICY
Evaluates against identity, residency, budget, risk.
04
Evaluate
SANDBOX
Runs benchmark + safety suites; collects evidence.
05
Approve
HUMAN OR BOT
Signs the decision; routes to the registry.
06
Audit
EVERYONE
Replayable, vendor-neutral evidence — forever.

The same document threads through all six steps — no re-keying, no per-vendor connectors, no lost context.

Where OCP sits

Between the agent and the
enterprise's existing controls.

Side A · The agent
What the agent emits
Intent & justification
Proposed scope & budget
Evaluation evidence
Identity attestation
OCP
Side B · The enterprise
What the enterprise binds
Identity & SSO (OIDC)
Policy engine (OPA, Cedar)
Finance & budget controls
Audit log / SIEM
Three buyers, one protocol

Adoption pressure comes
from three sides at once.

Enterprise

The CISO needs a record.

Banks · insurers · pharma · public sector

If their agents are autonomously adopting tools, they need a single audit trail that survives every vendor change.

Vendor

The seller needs a faster path in.

SaaS · APIs · model providers · OSS maintainers

Speaking OCP turns a months-long enterprise eval into a packet the buyer's policy engine can read in seconds.

Platform

The marketplace needs trust.

Agent platforms · clouds · capability marketplaces

OCP is the lingua franca that lets capabilities flow between platforms without re-certifying each one.

The wedge

We start with the
evaluation packet.

The narrowest, sharpest form of an OCP document is the artifact an agent produces when it tests a new capability — the bench results, costs, scopes, and signatures.

Enterprises will pay for it before any standard is ratified, because their agents are already running these evaluations and producing nothing portable.

Every packet our customers ship into their audit log is a working draft of the standard.

Phase 1 product
OCP Packet
Authority
  • Receives capability_request packets from any agent runtime
  • Signs, validates, and persists them in tamper-evident storage
  • Issues the canonical schema and reference validators
  • Exports to SIEM, GRC, and procurement systems on day one
  • Free for OSS evaluators · enterprise tier for hosted authority
How the moat compounds

Each adoption thickens
the next one.

01 · Schema gravity

Every signed packet is a vote for the schema.

The first authority that issues the canonical validator becomes the reference implementation everyone else integrates against.

02 · Two-sided network

Vendors speak it because buyers demand it.

Once a handful of large enterprises require an OCP packet from every capability under evaluation, the long tail of vendors follows in quarters, not years.

03 · Evidence corpus

Benchmarks become the benchmark.

The packets our customers produce form the largest corpus of grounded agent-evaluation evidence in existence — defensible, anonymized, and licensable.

04 · Standards capture

The neutral steward owns the room.

By spinning the spec into a foundation early, we become the convener — the layer no replacement can route around without breaking the world.

The next 18 months

The window
is open — and
narrow.

01

Agents are crossing the autonomy line.

Tool calls are no longer human-supervised. The first generation of fully agent-led adoptions is in production at top-50 banks right now.

02

Regulators are arriving.

The EU AI Act, NIS2, and forthcoming US executive guidance all imply an audit trail that doesn't yet exist in standard form.

03

No incumbent owns it.

Procurement vendors, agent platforms, and MCP authors each see one face of the problem. The neutral seat is empty for ~18 months.

The raise
$8M.
Seed round to publish the v1 specification, ship the reference Packet Authority, and land the first ten enterprise design partners.
45%
PROTOCOL · ENGINEERING
Spec authors, reference implementation, validators, and the OCP foundation governance.
35%
ENTERPRISE GTM
Design partner program with ten Fortune-500 firms across banking, pharma, and public sector.
20%
ECOSYSTEM
Open-source SDKs, vendor onboarding, and standards-body convening across MCP, OAuth, and OPA communities.
The bet

Agents will adopt
most of the world's
software. Someone
has to witness it.

WORKING GROUPopencapability.org / join
TECH PREVIEWgithub.com/ocp-spec
INVESTORSseed@opencapability.org