The Internet today has a permission 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 a big reason why identity and access management startups that help manage this new kind of digital workforce are raising venture capital.
Now, a 35-person Israeli-American startup called Venice is emerging from stealth with fresh cash and a lucky claim: that it’s already replacing industry stalwarts like CyberArk and Okta at Fortune 500 companies.
Founded just two years ago, Venice says it raised $20 million in Series A funding in December, led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures, which led the previous seed round.
Unlike many of its well-funded rivals – which include Persona (raised a 200 million dollars Series D last April), Veza (closed a 108 million dollars Series D last May) and GitGuardian SAS (uploaded 50 million dollars last week) – Venice addresses both cloud-based and on-premises environments, a technical choice that made the product more difficult to build but positioned it to win over large enterprises that still use legacy systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure.
At its helm is 31-year-old Rotem Lurie, whose path to entrepreneurship ticks almost all the boxes 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 force, before joining Microsoft as a product manager working on what would become Defender for Identity.
It later became the first product hire at Axis Security, an access management startup that it sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $500 million in 2022. Shortly before that acquisition closed, Lurie left to join YL Ventures, a venture firm focused on cybersecurity.
This short stint at YL Ventures proved highly instructive. “Every day, I would meet a group of three 23-year-old guys,” Lurie says bluntly on a Zoom call. “Most of these companies build their technology to get it. The overall strategy around what problem you’re solving and how you penetrate the market—it’s a completely different approach.”
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To replace incumbents like CyberArk, which has long dominated the privileged access management market, Lurie realized it would have to play a bigger game. That meant building technology that is both deep and comprehensive enough to support the complex, hybrid IT environments of most large enterprises.
The technical challenge before Lurie went like this: most identity and access management teams use about 10 different tools to manage who and what has access to enterprise systems. The Venice platform unifies this into a single system that handles privileged access to on-premise servers, SaaS applications and cloud infrastructure for humans and non-human entities.
“Tying everything together was what mattered most to the clients,” says Lurie. Indeed, Venice operates a SaaS subscription model, but Lurie insists it doesn’t compete on price. “We’re cutting costs, but it’s not because we’re cheap on pricing,” he explains.
“It’s because we save all the overhead [associated with many of today’s offerings]especially professional services” — the consulting fees and lengthy implementations that have become an almost inevitable toll on enterprise security development.
The gamble seems to be paying off. Lurie says Venice is “completely replacing” legacy vendors at Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 customers and reducing implementation time to just a week and a half, from the typical 6 months to 2 years, thanks to AI-driven automation. While he declined to name clients on the record, he told TechCrunch off the record that they include a 170-year-old, publicly traded manufacturing giant as well as a global music group.
Cack Wilhelm, the partner at IVP who led the Venice Series A, says Lurie stood out. “The problem with most cyber security games is that they all deal with something too small to ever be material,” says Wilhelm. “When you look at the huge exits — CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks — they did bold things from the beginning. Rotem is the same.”
Wilhelm points to the urgency created by AI agents as a key driver of IVP’s investment thesis. “If each person is going to have dozens of agents working on their behalf and privileged access tools created for a static world of IT professionals, we need our identity concept to adapt to that,” Wilhelm said. “Very often, when [companies] hacked, hacked by people just connecting with someone else’s credentials. You solve it with person-specific and moment-specific permissions.
Although crowded, the market seems eager for new solutions. Spending on identity and access management was expected to top $24 billion in 2025, up 13 percent 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 go-to-market team operates. Notably, nearly half of the cybersecurity firm is female, a rarity in one of tech’s most stubbornly male-dominated fields.
Lurie’s co-founder Or Vaknin serves as CTO (pictured with Lurie, above). The company’s investors include Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, and Raaz Herzberg, CMO at Wiz and Lurie’s former partner from their days as interns at Microsoft.
For Lurie, who says she has spent much of her career as “the only woman in the room,” building a more balanced team was not a calculated act. “You can never see yourself doing something unless you see someone like you doing it,” she says. “That’s something that attracts other women – to 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 rivals as they chase the same business buyers. Can the market support multiple winners? Or, will identity management follow the path of other security categories and consolidate around one or two dominant players?
