This former Microsoft PM thinks she can unseat CyberArk in 18 months

Source: TechCrunch

The internet today has a permissions problem. As non‑humans — chatbots, AI agents, and automated systems — have proliferated on the web, so has the need to provide them with credentials, permissions, and identities. That’s one major reason identity‑and‑access‑management (IAM) startups that help manage this new kind of digital workforce are raking in venture capital.

Venice: A New Player in IAM

A 35‑person Israeli‑American startup called Venice is emerging from stealth with fresh cash and a pretty plucky claim: it’s already replacing industry stalwarts like CyberArk and Okta at Fortune 500 companies.

• Founded: just over two years ago
• Series A: $20 million (December 2025)
  • Lead investor: IVP
  • Participation: Index Ventures (led the seed round)

Unlike many of its well‑funded rivals—Persona (raised a $200 M Series D in April 2025), Veza (closed a $108 M Series D in May 2025), and GitGuardian SAS (raised $50 M last week)—Venice tackles both cloud‑based and on‑premises environments. This technical choice makes the product harder to build but positions it to win over large enterprises that still run legacy systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure.

The Founder

At its helm sits 31‑year‑old Rotem Lurie, whose path to entrepreneurship pretty much ticks every box on VCs’ checklists.

• Background: daughter of two programmer parents in Israel (her mother was one of the country’s first female software engineers)
• Military service: four‑and‑a‑half years as a lieutenant in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence corps
• Early career: product manager at Microsoft on what became Defender for Identity
• Startup experience: first product hire at Axis Security, which sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $500 M in 2022
• Venture stint: brief role at YL Ventures, a cybersecurity‑focused venture firm

“Every day, I used to meet a team of three 23‑year‑old boys,” Lurie says straightforwardly over a Zoom call. “Most of those companies build their technology to be acquired. The entire strategy around what problem you’re solving and how you penetrate the market — it’s a completely different approach.”

The Market Challenge

To replace incumbents like CyberArk, which has long dominated the privileged‑access‑management market, Lurie realized she’d need to play a longer game. That meant building technology that’s both deep and comprehensive enough to support the complex, hybrid IT environments of most large enterprises.

The technical challenge: most IAM teams juggle roughly 10 different tools to manage who and what has access to corporate systems. Venice’s platform consolidates that sprawl into a single system that handles privileged access across:

• On‑premises servers
• SaaS applications
• Cloud infrastructure

…and does so for humans and non‑human entities alike.

“Tying everything together was what mattered to customers the most,” Lurie says.

Venice operates a SaaS subscription model, but Lurie insists it isn’t competing on price.

“We reduce the cost, but it’s not because we go cheap on pricing. It’s because we spare all the overhead [associated with many of today’s offerings], especially the professional services — the consultant fees and lengthy implementations that have become an almost unavoidable tax for enterprise security deployments.”

Early Traction

The bet appears to be paying off. Lurie says Venice is now “completely replacing” legacy vendors at Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 customers, cutting implementation time to just a week‑and‑a‑half (versus the typical 6 months to 2 years) thanks to AI‑powered automation.

Off the record to TechCrunch, she disclosed two reference customers: a 170‑year‑old, publicly traded manufacturing giant and a global music conglomerate.

Investor Perspective

Cack Wilhelm, partner at IVP who led Venice’s Series A, says Lurie stood out:

“The problem with most cybersecurity pitches is everyone’s tackling something too small to ever be material. When you look at the massive exits — CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks — they were doing audacious things from the beginning. Rotem is the same.”

Wilhelm points to the urgency created by AI agents as a key factor driving IVP’s investment thesis:

“If every individual is going to have tens of agents working on their behalf, and privileged‑access tools were built for a static world of IT professionals, we need our identity concept to adjust to that. Very often, when companies are breached, they’re breached by people simply logging in with someone else’s credentials. You solve that with just‑in‑time permissions that are scoped to the individual and the moment.”

Market Outlook

The IAM market remains crowded but eager for new solutions. According to the Identity Management Institute, IAM spending was expected to exceed $24 billion in 2025, a 13 % increase from the previous year.

Team & Culture

• Geography: R&D in Israel; go‑to‑market team in North America
• Diversity: Nearly half of the cybersecurity company’s workforce are women, a rarity in a sector that is stubbornly male‑dominated

Co‑founder & CTO: Or Vaknin (pictured with Lurie above).

Investors include:

• Assaf Rappaport, co‑founder and CEO of Wiz
• Raaz Herzberg, CMO at Wiz and Lurie’s former colleague from their Microsoft internship days

“You can never see yourself doing something if you didn’t see someone like you doing it,” Lurie says. “This is something that attracts…*”

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Outlook

Ther Women — To Feel Like They Can Be Part of It

The question now is whether Venice’s two‑year head start and early Fortune 500 wins will be enough to fend off deep‑pocketed competitors as they chase the same enterprise buyers.

Can the market support multiple winners? Or will identity management follow the path of other security categories and consolidate around one or two dominant players?