The current Internet has permission issues. As non-humans (chatbots, AI agents, automated systems) proliferate on the web, so does the need to provide them with credentials, permissions, and identity. This is one of the main reasons identity and access management startups that help manage this new kind of digital workforce are attracting venture capital funding.
Now, a 35-person Israeli-American startup called Venice is emerging from stealth with fresh funding and a brave claim. It’s already replacing industry heavyweights like CyberArk and Okta in the Fortune 500.
Founded just two years ago, Venice announced in December that it had raised $20 million in Series A funding led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures, which led the previous seed round.
Persona (raised $200 million in Series D last April), Veza (raised $108 million in Series D last week), GitGuardian Unlike many of its well-funded rivals, such as SAS (which raised $50 million last week), Venice works on both cloud-based and on-premises environments, and while technology choices have made the product difficult to build, it is positioned to win over large enterprises still running legacy systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure.
At the helm is 31-year-old Rotem Lurie, whose path to entrepreneurship ticks almost every box on a VC checklist. The daughter of Israeli programmer parents (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 unit, before joining Microsoft as a product manager, working on what later became Defender for Identity.
She then became her first product hire at Axis Security, an access management startup that was sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $500 million in 2022. Just before that acquisition closed, Lurie left to join YL Ventures, a venture firm focused on cybersecurity.
A short stint at YL Ventures proved particularly beneficial. “I met with a team of three 23-year-old boys every day,” Lurie said candidly on a Zoom call. “Most of those companies are building technology with the intention of being acquired. The whole strategy of what problems they solve and how they penetrate the market is a completely different approach.”
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To displace incumbents like CyberArk, which had long dominated the privileged access management market, Lurie realized it needed to play the long game. This meant we needed to build technology with enough depth and comprehensiveness to support the complex hybrid IT environments of most large enterprises.
The technical challenges faced by Lurie were: Most identity and access management teams juggle around 10 different tools to manage who has access to corporate systems. Venice’s platform consolidates these sprawls into a single system that handles privileged access for humans and non-human entities alike across on-premises servers, SaaS applications, and cloud infrastructure.
“Having everything tied together was the most important thing for our customers,” says Lurie. In fact, Lurie insists that while Venice operates a SaaS subscription model, it doesn’t compete on price. “We’re cutting costs, but it’s not about lower pricing,” she explains.
“Because you’re saving all the overhead.” [associated with many of today’s offerings]especially professional services” – consultancy fees and lengthy deployments that have become an almost unavoidable tax on enterprise security deployments.
It looks like that gamble is paying off. According to Lurie, Venice is now “totally replacing” traditional vendors for Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 customers, reducing implementation times from the typical six months to two years to just one and a half weeks thanks to AI-powered automation. She declined to name her clients publicly, but told TechCrunch off the record that they include a 170-year-old publicly traded manufacturing giant as well as a global music conglomerate.
Kac Wilhelm, a partner at IVP who led Venice’s Series A, said Lurie was outstanding. “The problem with most cybersecurity pitches is that they tackle things that are too small for anyone to care about,” Wilhelm says. “If you look at the big exits like CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, they were doing something bold from the beginning. Rotem is no different.”
Wilhelm points to the urgency created by AI agents as a key factor driving IVP’s investment thesis. “When you have dozens of agents working for each individual, and privileged access tools are built for the static world of IT professionals, you need an identity concept that accommodates that,” Wilhelm said. “Very often, [companies] If you are compromised, you can be compromised simply by logging in using someone else’s credentials. This problem can be solved with just-in-time authority, limited to the individual and the moment. ”
Although the market is crowded, it appears to be eager for new solutions. Spending on identity and access management is expected to exceed $24 billion in 2025, up 13% from the previous year, according to an industry group called the Identity Management Institute.
The Venice team is split between Israel, where R&D is based, and North America, where the market development team operates. Notably, nearly half of the cybersecurity company is female, an anomaly in one of tech’s most stubbornly male-dominated sectors.
Lurie co-founder Or Vaknin serves as CTO (pictured above with Lurie). The company’s investors include Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, and Raaz Herzberg, Wiz’s CMO and Lurie’s former colleague from his time as an intern at Microsoft.
For Lurie, who has spent much of her career as “the only woman in the room,” building a more balanced team wasn’t a calculated move. “If you don’t see people like you doing something, you’ll never see yourself doing something,” she says. “This is something that attracts other women and makes them feel like they can be a part of it.”
The question now is whether Venice’s two-year head start and early Fortune 500 wins will be enough to fend off deep-pocketed competitors chasing the same acquirers. Can the market support multiple winners, or will identity management follow the same path as other security categories and consolidate around one or two major players?
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