Alter: scoped credentials, policy checks, and audit trails for AI agents

Alter Vault is an authorization layer for applications and AI agents that need to call third-party APIs without handing every agent a long-lived shared secret. The decision is whether a team needs per-agent identity, scoped credentials, policy checks, human approvals, and a usable audit trail—not merely another secret store.

What it does

Alter says it stores credentials once, injects them only for an authorized request, evaluates policy, and records the call. Its public product includes agent identity, parameter-level policy, OAuth and API-key connections, human-in-the-loop approvals, MCP and AWS integrations, and a catalogue of 137 provider integrations (Alter homepage; Alter docs).

Fact	What the public sources say
Buyer	Engineering, security, and platform teams running agents or multi-user integrations
Core controls	Credential vault, policy engine, agent identity, approvals, and audit log
Public pricing	Free for 10,000 API calls/month; Starter $50/month; Growth $250/month; Enterprise custom
Integrations	The homepage lists 137 integrations and first-class MCP and LangChain support
Founders	Srikar and Kevan Dodhia

Why it fits

The value is at the request boundary. An agent can get a short-lived, narrow grant for one task, while a person or policy decides which parameters are acceptable. That is more useful than putting another static key in an environment file, especially when several agents share a backend and the team needs to answer who called what.

The pricing is unusually easy to map to an early deployment. Free includes 10,000 calls and 30-day audit retention; Starter adds unlimited retention and a support channel; Growth adds a support SLA; Enterprise covers custom integrations, deployment, and networking (Alter pricing). A buyer should resolve what counts as a provider call, how denied and retried requests are logged, how identity propagates through an agent's memory and tools, and what fails closed when the policy engine or provider is unavailable.

Alter's security page says SOC 2 is in progress and describes controls such as encrypted credential storage and fail-closed authorization; that is not the same as a completed certification (Alter homepage). YC describes the founders' prior enterprise infrastructure work at ComputeAI and Goldman Sachs, including systems connected to the London Stock Exchange and Apple Card launch (YC company profile).

Short version: Alter is a good fit for teams making agents act on behalf of users or touch production APIs. It earns a place in the stack only if the policy model is understandable to both developers and the security reviewer.

Sources checked — 2026-09-19

Cohort context

Alter is listed in Summer 2025. In our 2026-09-18 directory snapshot, 112 of 166 listed companies in that cohort have YC’s primary industry label B2B (67.5%). This is a current-directory comparison, not an original intake count or a performance ranking. Nine-cohort dataset.

Public website snapshot

Observed 2026-09-19T16:17:55.278Z in raw homepage HTML. This records visible metadata and advertised links, not agent execution or product quality.

Signal	Homepage observation
Product description metadata	Observed
Canonical link	Observed
H1 or H2 heading	Observed
Typed structured data	Observed
Docs/developer link	Observed
Pricing link	Observed
llms.txt link	Not observed in this response
Markdown alternate	Not observed in this response

Public observations · Collection method. Missing links here do not establish that a capability or file is absent elsewhere.