The internet today has a permissions problem. As non-humans — chatbots, AI agents and automated systems — have proliferated on the web, so has the need to provide them with credentials, permissions, and identities. That’s one major reason identity and access management startups that help manage this new kind of digital workforce are raking in venture capital.
Now, a 35-person Israeli-American startup called Venice is emerging from stealth with fresh cash and a plucky claim: that it’s already replacing industry stalwarts like CyberArk and Okta at Fortune 500 companies.
Venice, founded just over two years ago, says it raised $20 million in Series A funding in December, led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures, which led its earlier seed round.
Unlike many of its well-funded rivals – which include Persona (raised a $200 million Series D last April), Veza (closed a $108 million Series D last May), and GitGuardian SAS (raised $50 million last week) – Venice is tackling both cloud-based and on-premises environments, a technical choice that has made the product harder to build but positioned it to win over the large enterprises still running legacy systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure.
At its helm sits 31-year-old Rotem Lurie, whose path to entrepreneurship pretty much ticks every box on VCs’ checklists. The daughter of two programmer parents in Israel (her mother was one of the country’s first female software engineers), Lurie spent four-and-a-half years as a lieutenant in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence corps, before joining Microsoft as a product manager working on what would become Defender for Identity.
She later became the first product hire at Axis Security, an access management startup that sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $500 million in 2022. Just before that acquisition closed, Lurie left to join YL Ventures, a cybersecurity-focused venture firm.
That brief stint at YL Ventures proved particularly instructive. “Every day, I used to meet a team of three 23-year-old boys,” Lurie says straightforwardly over a Zoom call. “Most of those companies build their technology to be acquired. The entire strategy around what problem you’re solving and how you penetrate the market – it’s a completely different approach.”
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