Why Rancher's Founders Pivoted From Kubernetes to Agentic AI

Obot.ai just dropped out of stealth with $35M in seed and a big swing: it’s building a control plane for agentic AI, anchored on the now-standard **Model Context Protocol (MCP)**. Its **MCP Gateway** handles registry, secure proxying, RBAC, and observability for MCP servers. Think API gateway, but for LLM agents. On top of that, the **Nanobot framework** lets teams define secure, interactive agents in YAML—declarative by design, like IaC for AI behavior. **System shift:** It feels a lot like the early days of API gateways and K8s operators - bare metal turns into managed mesh. Governance moves from "afterthought" to "baked-in."