The web right now has a permissions downside. As non-humans — chatbots, AI brokers and automatic programs — have proliferated on the net, so has the necessity to present them with credentials, permissions, and identities. That’s one main purpose identification and entry administration startups that assist handle this new form of digital workforce are raking in enterprise capital.
Now, a 35-person Israeli-American startup referred to as Venice is rising from stealth with recent money and a plucky declare: that it’s already changing trade stalwarts like CyberArk and Okta at Fortune 500 corporations.
Venice, based simply over two years in the past, says it raised $20 million in Sequence A funding in December, led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures, which led its earlier seed spherical.
Not like lots of its well-funded rivals – which embrace Persona (raised a $200 million Sequence D final April), Veza (closed a $108 million Sequence D final Might), and GitGuardian SAS (raised $50 million final week) – Venice is tackling each cloud-based and on-premises environments, a technical selection that has made the product more durable to construct however positioned it to win over the big enterprises nonetheless working legacy programs alongside trendy cloud infrastructure.
At its helm sits 31-year-old Rotem Lurie, whose path to entrepreneurship just about ticks each field on VCs’ checklists. The daughter of two programmer dad and mom in Israel (her mom was one of many nation’s first feminine software program engineers), Lurie spent four-and-a-half years as a lieutenant in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence corps, earlier than becoming a member of Microsoft as a product supervisor engaged on what would turn out to be Defender for Identification.
She later grew to become the primary product rent at Axis Safety, an entry administration startup that bought to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $500 million in 2022. Simply earlier than that acquisition closed, Lurie left to hitch YL Ventures, a cybersecurity-focused enterprise agency.
That transient stint at YL Ventures proved notably instructive. “Day-after-day, I used to satisfy a group of three 23-year-old boys,” Lurie says straightforwardly over a Zoom name. “Most of these corporations construct their expertise to be acquired. The complete technique round what downside you’re fixing and the way you penetrate the market – it’s a very totally different strategy.”
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June 23, 2026
To interchange incumbents like CyberArk, which has lengthy dominated the privileged entry administration market, Lurie realized she’d have to play an extended sport. That meant constructing expertise that’s each deep and complete sufficient to assist the advanced, hybrid IT environments of most giant enterprises.
The technical problem forward of Lurie went thus: most identification and entry administration groups juggle roughly 10 totally different instruments to handle who and what has entry to company programs. Venice’s platform consolidates that sprawl right into a single system that handles privileged entry throughout on-premises servers, SaaS purposes, and cloud infrastructure for people and non-human entities alike.
“Tying all the things collectively was what mattered to prospects probably the most,” Lurie says. Certainly, Venice operates a SaaS subscription mannequin, however Lurie insists it isn’t competing on value. “We cut back the price, nevertheless it’s not as a result of we go low-cost on pricing,” she explains.
“It’s as a result of we spare all of the overhead [associated with many of today’s offerings], particularly the skilled companies” — the advisor charges and prolonged implementations which have turn out to be an nearly unavoidable tax for enterprise security deployments.
The wager seems to be paying off. Lurie says Venice is now “utterly changing” legacy distributors at Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 prospects, and reducing implementation time to only a week-and-a-half, from the everyday 6 months to 2 years, because of AI-powered automation. Whereas she declined to call prospects on the document, she informed information.killnetswitch off the document that they embrace a 170-year-old, publicly traded manufacturing big in addition to a world music conglomerate.
Cack Wilhelm, the associate at IVP who led Venice’s Sequence A, says Lurie stood out. “The issue with most cybersecurity pitches is everybody’s tackling one thing too small to ever be materials,” Wilhelm says. “Once you take a look at the huge exits — CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks — they had been doing audacious issues from the start. Rotem is similar.”
Wilhelm factors to the urgency created by AI brokers as a key issue driving IVP’s funding thesis. “If each particular person goes to have tens of brokers engaged on their behalf, and privileged entry instruments had been constructed for a static world of IT professionals, we want our identification idea to regulate to that,” Wilhelm mentioned. “Fairly often, when [companies] are breached, they’re breached by folks merely logging in with another person’s credentials. You resolve that with just-in-time permissions which might be scoped to the person and the second.”
Although crowded, the market appears keen for brand spanking new options. Identification and entry administration spending was anticipated to exceed $24 billion in 2025, rising by 13% from a 12 months earlier, in keeping with an trade group referred to as Identification Administration Institute.
Venice’s group is cut up between Israel, the place R&D relies, and North America, the place the go-to-market group operates. Notably, almost half of the cybersecurity firm is ladies, a rarity in one in all tech’s most stubbornly male-dominated sectors.
Lurie’s co-founder, Or Vaknin, serves as CTO (he’s pictured with Lurie, above). The corporate’s buyers embrace Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, and Raaz Herzberg, CMO at Wiz and Lurie’s former colleague from their days as interns at Microsoft.
For Lurie, who says she has spent a lot of her profession as “the one girl within the room,” making a extra balanced group wasn’t a calculated act. “You possibly can by no means see your self doing one thing in case you didn’t see somebody such as you doing it,” she says. “That is one thing that pulls different ladies — to really feel like they are often a part of it.”
The query now could be whether or not Venice’s two-year head begin and early Fortune 500 wins might be sufficient to fend off deep-pocketed opponents as they chase the identical enterprise consumers. Can the market assist a number of winners? Or, will identification administration observe the trail of different security classes and consolidate round one or two dominant gamers?
