He removed the admin key from the entire enterprise world - and built a company worth watching by doing it. From a dev desk in Aalborg, Denmark to Formula 1 circuits and a client list that includes McLaren and the Gates Foundation.
Enterprise clients secured by Admin By Request
Building practical security solutions that don't sacrifice usability for protection.Lars Sneftrup Pedersen - Admin By Request
The Story
The average enterprise employee spends roughly 11 minutes per week waiting for IT permissions they already had last Tuesday. Lars Pedersen noticed this - not as a frustration, but as an invitation. The problem was never really about admin rights. It was about trust: who gets it, when, and for how long. His answer became Admin By Request, a platform that eliminates the standing admin problem entirely by providing just-in-time elevated access. No permanent keys. No lingering credentials. No attack surface waiting to be exploited.
Lars founded the company in 2017 out of Aalborg, Denmark, a city more associated with fjords than FinTech - and that tension is partly the point. His team builds in northern Jutland. His clients sign in San Francisco, London, and Munich. The gap between those two places, the deliberate distance from the hype machine, is where Admin By Request does its best thinking. The platform now manages endpoint privilege across multiple continents, with datacenters live in Singapore, Germany, the United States, Netherlands, and the UK to meet the data sovereignty requirements of enterprise clients in regulated industries.
Before Admin By Request, Lars ran FastTrack Software Aps and ServiceBroker A/S - the latter managing consumer electronics repairs for major manufacturers. Before that, he worked as a senior developer and systems administrator at Telenor Denmark. The thread running through all of it is the same: complex systems, simplified. He has never been interested in security theater. The credential-based attack is still the most common entry vector in enterprise breaches. Lars built a company around removing the thing that makes those attacks possible - the always-on local administrator account - and replaced it with a workflow that gives access when needed and removes it when the work is done.
The product is now a full Privileged Access Management platform: endpoint privilege management, secure remote access, session recording, SIEM integration, AI-driven application trust scoring, and break-glass emergency accounts for the moments when everything goes sideways. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It handles agent-based and agentless devices. It integrates with ticketing systems, MFA providers, and identity management platforms. The engineering is quiet and careful - the kind that enterprise procurement teams notice after they've been burned by noisier alternatives.
The 2024 PwC Owner-Manager of the Year award in Northern Jutland - specifically the Thematic Prize for Digital Transformation - was not a surprise to anyone who had been watching Admin By Request grow. Nine hundred percent revenue growth over five years, while maintaining the company culture of a software house that thinks before it ships, is a specific kind of achievement. Lars collected the prize and kept building.
Career Timeline
Motorsport Partnership
Lars Pedersen sponsors Formula 1 and FIA World Endurance Championship driver Kevin Magnussen - a connection that says something deliberate about how he thinks about brand building. Not banner ads. Not conference booths. A partnership with one of motorsport's most recognizable names, renewed through 2026.
The Admin By Request logo rides on Magnussen's helmet and race suit at circuits from Bahrain to Las Vegas. The logic Lars articulated publicly: Magnussen operates at the very top level of international motorsport. That is exactly where Admin By Request intends to operate in endpoint security.
The two have shared podcast time on the Intellis platform discussing technology, ambition, and the pressure of performing on a world stage. It's not a vanity sponsorship. It's a statement of intent wrapped in carbon fiber.
Formula 1 & FIA WEC Driver
BMW M Motorsport
Partnership renewed 2026
Admin By Request branding
at F1 circuits worldwide
Philosophy & Approach
The endpoint is still the most reliably porous perimeter in enterprise security. Local administrator rights - once granted, rarely revoked, almost never audited - are the specific mechanism through which ransomware operators, credential thieves, and supply chain attackers move laterally after initial access. Lars Pedersen did not discover this problem. He decided to be the person who actually solved it at scale.
Admin By Request's approach is deceptively simple: remove standing admin rights entirely. When a user needs elevated access to install software, run a diagnostic, or complete a privileged task, they request it through a portal. The request is evaluated - against policy, against an AI trust score for the specific application, against the user's role and history. Access is granted for the duration of the task, then revoked. The session is recorded. The audit trail is exportable. The SIEM integration logs everything in real time.
The result is that credential theft becomes dramatically less useful. An attacker who gains a user's password on an Admin By Request-managed endpoint inherits a standard account with no standing privileges. The attack path that most enterprise breaches rely on simply does not exist. This is not marketing language. This is the documented mechanism by which the platform reduces organizational risk.
What makes Lars's version of this product defensible in a crowded PAM market is the usability constraint he built into the founding premise. Most enterprise security tools operate on an implicit assumption: friction is acceptable if it prevents bad outcomes. Lars rejected this. A tool that employees route around is not a security tool. It is a liability with good documentation.
Admin By Request is designed to be easier to use than the workarounds employees invent when security gets in their way. The approval workflows are fast. The AI-driven auto-approval for trusted applications removes friction from routine tasks. The mobile MFA integration fits into how people actually work. Vendors get time-limited access without requiring full account provisioning. IT teams get audit reports without manually assembling log files.
The platform now holds FedRAMP compliance credentials for U.S. government deployments and ISO 27001 certification. It supports CloudFlare tunnels for agentless remote access. It runs on every major operating system. Lars built it to go wherever enterprise IT goes - and then he went to Formula 1 circuits to make sure people noticed.
What Admin By Request Does
Elevated privileges granted for the duration of a specific task, then automatically revoked. No standing admin accounts.
Machine learning evaluates application requests against behavioral baselines. Trusted apps auto-approved; anomalies flagged.
Every elevated session captured. Full audit trail exportable to SIEM tools. Post-incident forensics built in by default.
Agentless support via CloudFlare tunnels. Vendor access with time limits. No VPN required for most use cases.
Pre-execution malware scan on every elevation request. Threat path mapping before access is granted.
FedRAMP compliant. ISO 27001 certified. Audit and compliance reports generated automatically for regulators.
Global Presence
Admin By Request operates offices across North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Scandinavia - with datacenters built to meet data residency and sovereignty requirements in each region.
Kevin Magnussen is a highly significant name at the very top level of international motorsport, much like our own ambition to be among the very best globally when it comes to developing software that strengthens IT security.Lars Sneftrup Pedersen - on the Kevin Magnussen partnership
Details That Matter
Lars was invited by the Danish foreign ministry to present on the world stage in China - a detail that speaks to the regard in which Danish government institutions hold Admin By Request's international position. This is not a company operating quietly in a regional niche.
In 2025, Lars joined Aalborg-based Intellis as a tech investor and ownership member, extending his footprint in the Northern Jutland startup ecosystem he helped legitimize.
Despite a San Francisco address and global offices, Admin By Request's core engineering team remains in Aalborg, Denmark. The deliberate distance from Silicon Valley groupthink is a feature, not an oversight.
Lars's central bet: a security tool employees work around is worse than no tool at all. Every ABR design decision starts with whether an actual employee, under actual time pressure, would use it without a workaround.
Admin By Request now covers endpoint privilege management, just-in-time access, secure remote access, session recording, anti-malware integration, AI auto-approval, SIEM integration, vendor access management, FedRAMP compliance, ISO 27001 certification, break-glass emergency accounts, device inventory, and audit log exporting. What started as a tool to remove local admin rights has become a comprehensive security operations platform - one built by a team that answers to a Dane in Aalborg, not a board in Palo Alto.
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