Andrej Safundzic, Alan Flores Lopez, and Leo Mehr met in a class at Stanford focused on ethics, public policy, and technological change. Safundzic — speaking to TechCrunch — says the class has led to the point where few people, particularly in the corporate sector, are in control of their online identity.
“The future of software lies in automating manual workflows completely end-to-end,” Safundzic said. “Authorization decisions are probably one of the first workflows that make sense for this, as it’s a very simple – but also very frequent – need with real business impact.”
This is the seed of an idea that led Safondzic, Lopez and Mehr to look for ways to better manage digital corporate identities. Their efforts culminated with Lumosa platform that helps companies manage application access rights across on-premises and cloud environments.
Accessible via a command line or the web, Lumos helps orchestrate tasks such as controls over which users have access to which applications and systems in an enterprise environment. In addition, Lumos can assess and recommend ways to reduce software license costs by tracking usage and integrating cost data. And — leveraging artificial intelligence — Lumos can turn support tickets into workflows and analyze employee data to recommend modifications to staff access credentials.
Lumos’ tools are especially useful for businesses with a lot of applications to wrangle, Safundzic says — which research shows most businesses are. Per BetterCloud, companies used an average of 130 apps by 2023, up 18% from the previous year.
“Now that people are starting to invest again, our capabilities around employee onboarding and ticketing automation are gaining ground because IT leaders want to enable their workforce to achieve more,” said Safondzic. “The future of access management is that IT access and identity management becomes more of a strategic function that coordinates and unleashes AI agents that automate repetitive tasks across different domains.”
With claims of 9x revenue growth by May 2022 and a customer base that includes Roku, MongoDB and Chegg, it’s no surprise that some VCs are throwing their weight behind Lumos. This week, the startup closed a $35 million Series B round led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from a16z, Harpoon Ventures, Neo and others.
With a total of more than $65 million in the bank, Lumos is well-positioned to take on the many, many rivals in the access and identity management markets, Safundzic says.
“Creating a generalizable core infrastructure makes it possible to mature our products much faster than normal,” said Safondzic. “Because of this, Lumos has been able to grow faster than competing point solutions because we serve multiple pain points for customers, which has made us appear in many different RFPs. For any company that builds an end-to-end platform, you’re going to have a lot of competitors because of the large surface area of the product.”
Lumos, which is based in San Francisco, plans to grow its workforce from 95 to ~150 by the end of the year.
