access-management
(15)
Imprivata Found a $3.6 Million Tax Hiding in Hospital Logins
A badge tap looks trivial. Across 19 hospitals, it helped give clinicians back 49,057 hours a year - and turned a login utility into the wedge for a much larger identity business.
Saviynt Spent 16 Years Policing Employee Access. Then the Employees Stopped Being Human.
The enterprise-security company built one control room for human access. Now a fast-growing population of AI agents is testing whether that converged model can govern machines moving at machine speed.
Lumos
Lumos began by replacing the IT ticket queue with an internal app store. Six years later, it is betting that the next identity administrator will be a coordinated crew of software agents - with humans reserved for the judgment calls.
Modern
Modern is a San Francisco startup building an AI-native IT function - a single platform where always-on agents automate help desk, access, hardware, on/off-boarding, security and procurement inside the tools teams already use, such as Slack, Teams, email and voice. Founded in 2026 by Seb Poole and Aleks Tomovski and backed by Y Combinator (P26), it positions itself as a ServiceNow alternative that resolves requests end-to-end rather than routing tickets, claiming 80%+ automation of inbound IT requests.
Ilantus Services
Ilantus Services is an identity-centric cybersecurity company that designs, implements, and operates Identity and Access Management (IAM) programs on a Zero Trust framework. Founded in 2000 and now a subsidiary of Network Intelligence, it blends advisory, implementation, and 24x7 managed services with AI-powered accelerators - tools like AiA (application onboarding), iAudit (access certification), iDash (monitoring), and iTDR (identity threat detection) - to help enterprises across finance, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and government control who has access to what, and why.
Serval
Serval is a San Francisco software company building an AI-native IT service management (ITSM) platform. Founded in 2024 by Jake Stauch and Alex McLeod, it lets IT teams describe workflows in plain English and turns them into executable, auditable automations - handling help desk tickets, just-in-time access, onboarding and offboarding. Customers report automating more than half of their IT tickets, and the company reached a reported $1 billion valuation roughly 18 months after launch, backed by Sequoia, Redpoint, General Catalyst and First Round.
Cirrus Identity
Cirrus Identity is an Oakland-based software company that runs managed, cloud-hosted identity and access management for higher education, research institutions, non-profits and healthcare. Founded in 2013 by former UC Berkeley identity staff, it acts as a proxy and bridge between commercial identity providers (Entra ID, Okta, Duo, Google) and the multilateral research-and-education federations - InCommon, eduGAIN, the Canadian Access Federation and GakuNin - that campuses depend on but that most commercial IdPs do not support. More than 200 universities use it to retire aging Shibboleth deployments, let alumni and applicants log in with social accounts, and standardize authentication without rebuilding every application.
SecureAuth
SecureAuth is an Irvine, California identity security company that has spent two decades trying to answer one stubborn question: is the person (or machine, or AI agent) on the other end of a login really who they claim to be? Founded in 2005, it built a name on risk-based and passwordless authentication, then doubled down on AI with its Arculix platform, continuous facial assurance, and a 'microperimeter' that extends Zero Trust controls to AI agents. Today it serves both workforce (IAM) and customer (CIAM) use cases for 250+ enterprises across regulated industries, protecting more than 250 million identities.
Anthony Chow
Anthony Chow is the CEO and co-founder of igloo (igloohome), a Singapore-built smart access company whose Bluetooth locks open without Wi-Fi using time-sensitive PIN codes. What began as an Airbnb host's annoyance over after-midnight key handoffs became a company that has issued more than 20 million digital credentials, sold locks in 90-plus countries, and even sent a batch of locks to space. A data scientist turned hardware founder, Chow trades on a simple, stubborn idea: a world without keys.
Umaimah Khan
Umaimah Khan is the co-founder and CEO of Opal Security, a San Francisco identity security company building the controls that decide who - and increasingly what - can access an organization's systems. A homeschooled math kid who entered MIT at 16 and fell for cryptography, she did research embedded with government agencies including DARPA, then engineered infrastructure and security at two startups that became unicorns. She founded Opal in 2020 to treat authorization as the hard technical problem she believes it is, and has raised roughly $32M, including a $22M Series B in December 2023. Opal's customers include Cloudflare, Figma, Databricks, Scale AI, Grammarly and Perplexity.
Opal Security
Opal Security is an AI-native identity and access governance platform that gives enterprises real-time visibility and direct control over every identity - employees, service accounts, and AI agents alike. Founded in 2020 in San Francisco, Opal replaces stale, checkbox-style access reviews with policy-as-code and just-in-time access so organizations can enforce least privilege at scale instead of merely auditing it after the fact.
Chaithanya Yambari
Chaithanya Yambari is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zluri, a next-generation Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform that helps enterprise IT teams discover, manage, secure, and automate their SaaS applications. An engineer from BITS Pilani, he spent nearly a decade rising from software developer to Director of Engineering at gamification startup KNOLSKAPE before co-founding Zluri in 2020 alongside Ritish Reddy and Sethu Meenakshisundaram. Under his technical leadership, Zluri has raised $32M in total funding - including a $20M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in July 2023 - and now serves 270+ employees and hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide.
Teleport
Teleport is the infrastructure identity company. Its open-source Access Platform replaces shared secrets, VPNs, and long-lived credentials with short-lived cryptographic identities for humans, machines, and AI agents accessing servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, applications, and Windows desktops.
Cerby
Cerby is an identity security automation platform that brings nonstandard and disconnected applications - the ones that don't speak SAML, SCIM, or OIDC - into the identity lifecycle of enterprise IdPs like Okta, Azure AD, and Ping. Using robotic process automation and agentic AI, Cerby automates onboarding, offboarding, credential rotation, and access governance for the apps traditional IAM tools leave behind.
Belsasar Lepe
Belsasar 'Bel' Lepe is co-founder and CEO of Cerby, the identity automation platform built to secure the applications that traditional identity tools ignore - the sprawling layer of disconnected, nonstandard, and unmanageable apps that enterprises actually run on. A first-generation Mexican-American and Stanford Computer Science graduate, Lepe started at Google at 18, then co-founded Ooyala - a video technology company that achieved two exits totaling over $440M - before turning his attention to the gaping hole in enterprise identity security. Cerby raised $54M in Series B funding in 2025, counts L'Oréal, Fox, and Allstate among its customers, and has grown ARR 10x in under two years.