The internet today has a permissions problem. As non-humans like chatbots, AI agents, and automated systems have proliferated on the web, so has the need to provide them with credentials, permissions, and identities. This is a major reason identity and access management startups that help manage this new digital workforce are attracting significant venture capital.
Now, a 35-person Israeli-American startup called Venice is emerging from stealth with fresh cash and a notable claim: it is already replacing industry stalwarts like CyberArk and Okta at Fortune 500 companies.
Founded just over two years ago, Venice 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, Venice tackles both cloud-based and on-premises environments. This technical choice has made the product harder to build but positions it to win over large enterprises still running legacy systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure.
At its helm is 31-year-old Rotem Lurie. The daughter of two programmer parents in Israel, Lurie spent four-and-a-half years as a lieutenant in Israel’s elite Unit 8200 intelligence corps. She then joined 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 the cybersecurity-focused venture firm YL Ventures.
That brief stint at YL Ventures proved instructive. Lurie notes that meeting young founding teams showed her how many companies build technology purely to be acquired, which involves a completely different approach to solving problems and penetrating the market.
To replace incumbents like CyberArk, Lurie realized she needed to play a longer game. This meant building technology deep and comprehensive enough to support the complex, hybrid IT environments of most large enterprises.
The technical challenge was clear. Most identity and access management teams juggle roughly ten different tools to manage access to corporate systems. Venice’s platform consolidates that sprawl into a single system that handles privileged access across on-premises servers, SaaS applications, and cloud infrastructure for both humans and non-human entities.
Venice operates a SaaS subscription model, but Lurie insists it is not competing on price. The cost reduction comes from sparing the overhead associated with many offerings, especially the professional services, consultant fees, and lengthy implementations that have become a tax for enterprise security deployments.
The bet appears to be paying off. Lurie says Venice is now completely replacing legacy vendors at Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 customers, cutting implementation time to just a week-and-a-half from the typical six months to two years, thanks to AI-powered automation. While not naming customers on the record, she cited a 170-year-old publicly traded manufacturing giant and a global music conglomerate.
Cack Wilhelm, the partner at IVP who led Venice’s Series A, says Lurie stood out. He notes that while most cybersecurity pitches tackle something too small, the massive exits come from companies doing audacious things from the beginning, and Lurie is following that path. Wilhelm points to the urgency created by AI agents as a key investment driver, emphasizing the need for identity concepts to adjust to a world where individuals have many agents working on their behalf.
Though crowded, the market seems eager for new solutions. Identity and access management spending was expected to exceed $24 billion in 2025, increasing by 13% from the year before.
Venice’s team is split between Israel, where research and development is based, and North America, where the go-to-market team operates. Notably, nearly half of the cybersecurity company is women, a rarity in one of tech’s most stubbornly male-dominated sectors.
Lurie’s co-founder, Or Vaknin, serves as chief technology officer. The company’s investors include Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, and Raaz Herzberg, chief marketing officer at Wiz and Lurie’s former colleague from their days as interns at Microsoft.
For Lurie, who has often been the only woman in the room, creating a more balanced team was not a calculated act. She believes you can never see yourself doing something if you didn’t see someone like you doing it, and a balanced environment attracts other women who feel they can be 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 enterprise 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?