Tel Aviv-based Akeyless, which provides a SaaS-based (software as a service) vault for secrets management and zero-trust access, said Wednesday it secured a $14 million Series A round of financing, led by Team8 and with participation from Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).
The firm will use the funding to accelerate its product development and growth, it said.
The company was founded in 2018 by serial entrepreneurs Shai Onn, Oded Hareven and Refael Angel.
Akeyless helps organizations manage secret data such as passwords, credentials, certificates, and keys between IT security platforms and teams. Its platform leverages Distributed Fragments Cryptography, its proprietary, patent-pending IP, to perform cryptographic operations using fragments of encryption keys without ever combining them, the company said.
Akeyless experienced tremendous growth in 2020, and was recognized by Gartner as a key player in the realm of workload identities and trusted by enterprises in multiple sectors, the company said.
“Having the backing of both Team8 and JVP, the ideal venture partners given their track record in powering the success of innovative cybersecurity start-ups, 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.”
“We are happy to welcome Team8 joining us in building the next category leader in the secrets management domain,” said Yoav Tzruya, a JVP general partner. “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 with 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.”