identity-governance
(15)
SPHERE Turned Cybersecurity’s Dirtiest Chore Into a Growth Business
Rita Gurevich spent the financial crisis untangling Lehman Brothers’ technology estate. Her company now sells the same hard-won discipline as software - finding forgotten access, assigning owners and cleaning it up before an auditor or attacker does.
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.
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.
Nudge Security
Nudge Security is an Austin-based cybersecurity company that helps organizations discover and govern the SaaS and AI applications their employees adopt, often without IT's knowledge. Founded in 2021 by Russell Spitler and Jaime Blasco, the platform combines Day One SaaS and AI app discovery, security posture management, identity governance, third-party risk, and spend management, then reaches employees directly with 'security nudges' via browser, Slack, and Teams to guide safer choices without blocking work. It raised a $22.5M Series A in November 2025 and serves nearly 200 customers.
Oasis Security
Oasis Security is a New York and Tel Aviv based cybersecurity company that built the first enterprise platform purpose-built to discover, secure, and govern non-human identities (NHIs) - the service accounts, API keys, tokens, workloads, and increasingly the AI agents that now vastly outnumber human users in modern cloud environments. Founded in 2022 by former Israeli intelligence engineers Danny Brickman and Amit Zimmerman, Oasis gives security teams a single source of truth for machine identities, automating inventory, posture management, threat detection, remediation, and full lifecycle governance. As enterprises race to deploy AI agents that can act autonomously with real credentials, Oasis positions its Agentic Access Management platform as the control layer that lets companies scale AI without losing control of who - and what - has access.
Token Security
Token Security is a New York- and Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company that secures non-human identities (NHIs) - the service accounts, API tokens, workloads and, increasingly, autonomous AI agents that now vastly outnumber human users inside enterprises. Its agentless platform continuously discovers these machine identities across cloud, SaaS and AI environments, maps their ownership, permissions and access into a unified identity graph, and enforces least-privilege and lifecycle controls. Founded in 2023 by CEO Itamar Apelblat and CTO Ido Shlomo, the company has raised roughly $27M (Seed plus a $20M Series A led by Notable Capital) and counts customers such as GitLab, Bloomreach, HiBob, Dayforce and BetterHelp.
Veza
Veza is an identity security company that helps enterprises understand and control who can take what action on what data. Its patented Access Graph maps permissions across cloud platforms, SaaS apps, data systems, and infrastructure for human, machine, and AI identities, letting organizations enforce least privilege, automate access reviews, and govern non-human and AI-agent identities. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in the California Bay Area, Veza agreed to be acquired by ServiceNow in a deal announced December 2025.
Delinea
Delinea is a San Francisco-based cybersecurity company that builds identity and privileged access management (PAM) software. Formed in 2021 from the merger of PAM veterans Thycotic and Centrify and rebranded as Delinea in 2022, the company secures the credentials, secrets, and privileged accounts that human users, machines, applications, and - increasingly - AI agents use to reach an organization's most sensitive systems. Its flagship Secret Server vault, Privilege Manager, DevOps Secrets Vault, and the cloud-native Delinea Platform are used by thousands of enterprises worldwide to enforce least privilege, rotate passwords, record sessions, and detect identity-based threats across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Radiant Logic
Radiant Logic is an enterprise identity-data company whose RadiantOne platform unifies fragmented identity information scattered across legacy directories, cloud apps, and databases into a single, real-time Identity Data Fabric. Born from the invention of the virtual directory in 2000, the company now layers AI-driven analytics and a generative assistant (AIDA) on top of that unified data so organizations can see who has access to what, spot identity risk, and remediate it. More than 30% of the Fortune 100 and roughly 60% of U.S. Federal Cabinet agencies rely on it to streamline operations, reduce risk, and simplify compliance.
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.
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.
Ritish Reddy
Ritish Reddy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Zluri, a San Francisco-based enterprise SaaS management and identity governance platform that has raised $32M and earned back-to-back recognition as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader. A serial entrepreneur on his third venture, Ritish previously co-founded Cranium Media and was part of the founding team at KNOLSKAPE, where he served as Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Global Partnerships. With an MBA from SP Jain School of Global Management, he brings deep expertise in marketing, partnerships, and scaling enterprise software go-to-market motions across India, APAC, and North America.
Zluri
Zluri is a next-gen SaaS Management and Identity Governance platform that helps IT and security teams discover every app and identity inside an enterprise, automate joiner-mover-leaver workflows, and run access reviews without spreadsheets. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in San Francisco with engineering in Bengaluru, it serves 250+ enterprise customers including Monday.com, Tipalti, Whoop, Razorpay, and Traveloka.
Geoffrey Mattson
Geoffrey Mattson is the CEO of SecureAuth, an AI-driven identity and access management company based in Irvine, California. A globally recognized cybersecurity and AI engineer, Mattson brings a career spanning Bell Labs, Nortel, Huawei, Juniper Networks, Bay Networks, and multiple security startups. He co-founded MistNet.ai, an AI-driven threat detection platform acquired by LogRhythm in 2021, then led Xage Security to 420% revenue growth as CEO before joining SecureAuth in December 2025. He holds multiple patents in AI, cybersecurity, and networking, and is focused on securing the emerging frontier of human, machine, and AI-agent identities.