Andrej Safundzic and the art of getting past the gatekeeper

An email address stood between Andrej Safundzic and an experiment in German government. He wanted technologists to spend a summer working on public problems. The person he wanted to reach was Helge Braun, head of the Federal Chancellery. Safundzic tried different combinations of Braun’s email address until one worked. Before there was a fellowship, a company, or an acquisition, there was the small business of getting a message delivered.

It is an apt beginning for someone who would later build a company concerned with access. His career has repeatedly brought him to the same awkward place: people have something useful to do, but the institution around them makes doing it difficult. In Berlin, the challenge was getting technical talent into government. At Lumos, the software company he co-founded in 2020, it is getting people the tools they need while keeping permissions under control.

The email that found its way in

The first Tech4Germany cohort, in 2018, was small enough to count without a spreadsheet: nine fellows and two projects. Five developers, three product managers, and a designer worked on federal digital services. A €191,000 grant from the Volkswagen Foundation helped cover the first two years. A proposal had become a place where people could actually work.

The distinction matters. Governments can endorse an idea without acquiring the capacity to carry it out. Tech4Germany gave the idea a schedule, colleagues, and actual projects. It made a short stay in public service possible for people whose skills were also wanted elsewhere.

In August 2019, Safundzic, Christina Lang, and Sonja Anton founded 4Germany. By November, the fellowship’s results were being presented to the federal cabinet at Meseberg. In September 2020, the government acquired the organization and converted it into DigitalService4Germany. The experiment had acquired an unusually literal form of staying power: it became part of the state.

Safundzic remembers the acquisition call as a decisive moment. There is a particular satisfaction in persuading a large institution to make room for something it has never quite done before. The email had opened a conversation; the organization gave that conversation somewhere to go.

A fishing pole with no waiting list

Germany was one stop in a broader attempt to make useful systems. In Uganda, Safundzic helped establish EduGlobe, which developed an entrepreneurship curriculum and trained teachers. The premise was practical: young people were running small businesses, yet their schooling offered little preparation for entrepreneurship.

In 2017, that work expanded to university students through StartHub Africa. Early support came from a foundation and crowdsourcing; Ugandan companies subsequently paid for training. The mechanism mattered as much as the initial generosity. Teaching materials, trained teachers, and an organization that could earn support offered a way for the work to continue.

His Stanford Knight-Hennessy profile offers a useful expression of this ambition. The familiar argument about giving someone a fish or teaching them to fish was insufficient for him. He wanted an affordable fishing pole that could do the work automatically. It is a technologist’s answer, with a founder’s interest in distribution built in.

Stanford lists him in its 2020 Knight-Hennessy cohort, studying computer science, after undergraduate work at the Technical University of Munich. It identifies his hometown as Bad Reichenhall, Germany. The journey from there to East Africa, Berlin, and California involved different institutions, but a recurring attraction to problems that could be made easier for many people at once.

Four hundred versions of Andrej

At Stanford, the scale of the next problem appeared in a password manager. Safundzic and Leo Mehr were taking Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change. A discussion about control over online identities prompted him to look at his own accounts. He found 400 stored passwords.

They brought in Alan Flores-López, whose experience included security work at Samsara. Their discussion turned to the gap between logging into an account and managing what that account can do. It is easy to collect another digital identity. Keeping track of its permissions, continued usefulness, and eventual removal is less convenient.

In a company, that inconvenience becomes shared work. An employee needs a tool. A manager approves it. IT creates access. Someone later changes jobs, or leaves. The account and its permissions need to change too. Finance has a related question about the license bill. Each department sees a different piece of the same person’s relationship with software.

Lumos approached that work as a connected system. Its platform brought access management together with visibility into application usage and spending. The promise had something to offer each participant: employees could request tools, administrators could govern access, and the business could identify licenses it no longer needed. The annoying support ticket had become a product brief.

Two years with the curtains drawn

The company’s early history contains a useful complication for anyone tempted to reduce Safundzic to pure impatience. Lumos started in mid-2020 and stayed in stealth until 2022. Neo traces its beginnings to its 2020 Hack Month, where Safundzic and Mehr started working on it; Flores-López had already been a Neo Scholar.

Safundzic has written about resisting advice to launch sooner. During that interval, the team developed the product, hired, and worked out how to explain itself. He wanted prospective customers to understand why they should change their working habits. An announcement could attract attention, but attention would not finish the software.

By the time Lumos emerged, it had raised more than $30 million. In May 2024, it announced another $35 million in Series B financing, led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from a16z, Harpoon Ventures, Neo, and others. Safundzic reported ninefold revenue growth since the previous round and named customers including Pinterest, MongoDB, and GitHub. Those were company-reported milestones at that point in its development.

The money backed a demanding choice. Lumos was trying to join several categories of enterprise software through a common understanding of access. A broad platform gives a customer more reasons to consider it and gives its builders more responsibilities. The attractive diagram has to survive contact with an actual organization’s permissions.

In December 2024, Lumos acquired Fastgen’s technology, a low-code system for building workflows. Safundzic’s explanation emphasized flexibility: different companies need different processes. A product intended to simplify administration still needs to accommodate the peculiarities of the institution using it. Uniform software encounters wonderfully nonuniform humans.

A company with a plot

Safundzic’s interest in stories runs deeper than launch copy. He has written about loving storybooks as a child and about the way stories carry values. At Lumos, employees are called Alchemists, and the values framework is named The Anatomy of an Alchemist. The language asks colleagues to imagine themselves making something together.

That approach also appears in his argument that the customer should occupy the leading role in a company’s story. An IT administrator’s working day provides plenty of material: repeated requests, changing permissions, and an audit approaching with the social grace of an overdue bill. The product needs to help that person get somewhere better.

“Trust action over doubt.”

Andrej Safundzic

There is room for a little silliness in his account of leadership. Asked what weapon he would use against a giant, he chose a banana peel. He draws on football when discussing teamwork, with an interest in the system that helps players perform together. The jokes suit someone who wants colleagues to feel excited about a mission, even when the daily work concerns account permissions.

In March 2026, he marked Lumos’s inclusion on Forbes America’s Best Startup Employers list by writing about the effort of maintaining culture as the company grows. That is a continuing obligation for a founder who has made shared purpose part of the pitch. New colleagues have to experience it in the way work gets done.

Now the software needs a key

The latest chapter gives the access problem a new participant. AI agents can act across company systems. They need credentials, owners, boundaries, and a way to have their authority withdrawn. A tool that acts quickly makes uncertainty about its permissions rather less charming.

Lumos introduced Albus in June 2025 to assist with identity governance, including the construction of roles and access policies. Safundzic describes a system that can work through messy organizational information, propose decisions, and incorporate administrators’ feedback. The aim is to reduce routine handling while keeping people involved in setting the rules.

By June 2026, he was writing about an Identity Agent Force. A September session with Mehr put the management questions plainly: how many agents exist, who owns them, what they can reach, and what happens when one is turned off. These are basic inventory questions with consequential answers.

The progression makes his career feel less scattered than its geography suggests. A curriculum, a fellowship, and an access platform each create a structure in which other people can work. The setting changes; the stubborn details remain. Someone needs permission. Someone else needs confidence that granting it makes sense. Safundzic keeps looking for a better arrangement between the two.