Israel’s Akeyless Raises $14M For Its Encryption eys Management Platform

Akeyless, a unified secrets management system that enables users to create, protect, and store encryption keys, credentials, and certificates, has raised a $14 million Series A funding round, led by cybersecurity think tank Team 8, with participation by global VC Jerusalem Venture Partners, the company announced on Wednesday.

Founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneurs Shai Onn, president, Oded Hareven, CEO, and Refael Angel, CTO, Akeyless provides a Secrets Orchestration Platform that successfully unifies several related use cases via a single solution. It offers secrets management, zero-trust access (PAM 2.0) and data protection (encryption, signing and KMS), based on Akeyless DFC, the firm’s unique virtual HSM (Hardware Security Module) technology certified by Federal Information Processing Standards.

The platform leverages Distributed Fragments Cryptography (DFC), its proprietary, patent-pending  IP, to provide a SaaS-based root-of-trust in a non-trusted distributed environment. This performs cryptographic operations using fragments of encryption keys without ever combining them, ensuring that Akeyless or any third party cannot access a customer’s secrets and/or keys.

The startup said it will use the funding to accelerate product development and growth of the world’s first SaaS-based unified vault, built for secrets management and zero-trust access.

As the transformation to hybrid and multi-cloud continues to evolve and expand, secrets – such as passwords, credentials, certificates, and keys – are heavily used between workloads as well as by privileged users, across DevOps and IT security platforms and teams, the company said. What was previously solved by plain key management system (KMS) or privileged access management (PAM) solutions has become much more challenging given the scale and ephemeral nature of the new cloud-native distributed infrastructure, which requires a completely new approach to managing privileged access for machines and humans

“Having the backing of both Team8 and JVP, the ideal venture partners given their track record in powering the success of innovative cybersecurity startups, is testimony to the disruption Akeyless brings to the market,” said Hareven. “We are thrilled to have their invaluable support as we bring our innovative secrets management platform into the new era of hybrid and multi-cloud. Our highly scalable enterprise-grade service is designed to serve an infinite number of customers, secrets and transactions, built on top of multi-region and multi-cloud operations.”

“We are happy to welcome Team8, joining us in building the next category leader in the secrets management domain,’’ said Yoav Tzruya, general partner, JVP. “We’ve seen Akeyless demonstrate its value, providing a ubiquitous, zero-trust, secrets management as-a-service to large-scale customers over the last year. We believe that in joining forces with Team8 and the founders, we will be able to build Akeyless to its full potential as a dominant solution.”

“Secrets management is a top priority for enterprises,” said Liran Grinberg, managing partner at Team8 Capital. “But cloud providers’ offerings are limited, and Akeyless’s competitors’ solutions are expensive, incomplete and hard to maintain. Akeyless’s robust secrets management-as-a-service doesn’t require an enterprise to install and maintain it, making it frictionless and affordable. As companies migrate to the cloud, the combination of secrets management and zero trust is critical – Akeyless applies advanced cryptography to make its SaaS offering resilient to attacks.”