Venice raises $25 million to challenge identity security incumbents

Venice, an Israeli-American cybersecurity startup, is emerging from stealth after raising $25 million in Series A funding. The company, which closed the round in December, claims it is already replacing industry stalwarts like CyberArk and Okta at Fortune 500 companies. The funding round was led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures. Venice is entering the market with a focus on tackling both cloud-based and on-premises environments. This technical approach allows the startup to target enterprises that still run legacy systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure.

The 35-person startup is led by co-founder and CEO Rotem Lurie, a former Microsoft product manager and alumnus of Axis Security, which was acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $500 million. Lurie, who also served in Unit 8200—the Israeli intelligence corps—co-founded Venice with CTO Or Vaknin. The company’s team is split between Israel, where research and development is based, and North America, where the go-to-market team operates. Venice aims to unseat CyberArk, an incumbent that has long dominated privileged access management, which is a security category for managing access to critical systems. Lurie thinks she can unseat CyberArk in 18 months, and claims Venice is already replacing legacy vendors at Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies. To do this, Venice consolidates identity and access management into a single platform, eliminating the need for multiple tools. “We reduce the cost, but it’s not because we go cheap on pricing,” Lurie said, explaining that the platform cuts down on the professional services and implementation times typically associated with enterprise security deployments.

The market for identity and access management is growing. According to the Identity Management Institute, spending in the sector was expected to exceed $24 billion in 2025, representing a 13% increase from the previous year. This growth has attracted venture capital to several competitors:

• Persona: Raised a $200 million Series D funding round last April.
• Veza: Closed a $108 million Series D funding round last May.
• GitGuardian SAS: Raised $50 million in funding last week.

Despite these rivals, Venice’s backers believe its approach will set it apart. Investors in the startup include Wiz co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, Wiz CMO Raaz Herzberg, and IVP. Cack Wilhelm, a partner at IVP, noted that Venice is addressing a challenge as non-human identities and AI agents proliferate. Wilhelm stated that when companies are breached, they are often compromised by attackers logging in with someone else’s credentials, a problem Venice aims to solve with just-in-time permissions.

Why it matters

As AI agents proliferate, the complexity of managing digital identities is surging; Venice is betting that replacing legacy, fragmented security tools with a unified platform can capture a massive share of the identity management market.