Alter (YC S25) – Access control for multi-user agents

Hi HN! We’re Srikar and Kevan, founders of Alter – https://alterauth.com/. We’re building access control for agents that can take actions on behalf of multiple users.If you’ve built an internal agent people use through Slack, you may have experienced this scenario: everyone signs in with their own account, but the agent connects to the CRM or billing system with one shared API key, so the agent can do anything that the key can do. User-level authentication in Slack does nothing to control what the agent can do in an external system like the CRM or billing system.Here’s what Alter does:-It acts as a proxy and manages downstream credentials for every API request that an agent takes;-It takes identity into account for every action the agent does. Automatically take into account the end user identity of the person that the agent is taking actions on behalf of.-It enforces fine grained runtime policies and records compliance grade audit logs.Here’s a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZqPU14ipGEWe started this because we saw first hand how hard it is to build agents in regulated industries. To unlock the true benefits of agents we need to allow agents to take actions, sometimes actions on behalf of end users. I (Srikar) was working at Goldmans and I saw how prohibitively expensive it was for me as a developer to write my own custom auth to enable multi-tenancy in agents and to allow agents to have strict policy controls as they act on behalf of end users. My co-founder, Kevan, is a second time founder and was previously working on a database startup. He has experience building and selling deep tech into highly regulated environments. So this problem seemed like a natural fit for the both of us.Building and maintaining custom auth for multi tenant agents was challenging. But so was ensuring that the solution we developed was secure, scalable and keeping track of security grade audit logs. As a result we realized there needs to be a