Akeyless raises $65M to provide Secrets Management as-a-Service for DevOps and multi-cloud environments

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Nov 16, 2022, 10:00 ET

The round was led by NGP Capital, with participation from existing investors Team8 Capital and JVP. The company, which has seen a 350% growth in revenue over the past year, will use the funds to double the size of its global team, as well as expand and enhance its platform

NEW YORK and TEL AVIV, Israel, Nov. 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Akeyless, the leading SaaS-based Secrets Management Platform for securing DevOps and IT workloads within hybrid and multi-cloud environments, today announced $65 million in series B funding, bringing the total funding to date to $80 million. The round was led by NGP Capital, with participation from existing investors Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP). In addition, the company announced that Mike Christenson, the former COO & President of New Relic and CA Technologies, has joined as an investor and board member.

There's been rapid growth in recent years in the adoption of cloud services and modern DevOps processes, necessitating a new approach to how organizations manage their secrets (e.g. credentials, certificates, and keys). A recent report found that the number of secrets leaked by organizations doubled last year, reaching an all-time high of more than six million.

"Existing secrets management solutions don't meet the current needs of enterprises," said Oded Hareven, CEO and co-founder of Akeyless. "Organizations are looking for an alternative to open source secret vaults — that are far from free when you consider the extensive maintenance requirements — and commercial solutions with high licensing costs that are difficult to deploy and use. Secret management should reduce the attack surface but existing solutions only increase it by creating additional infrastructure for teams to secure and maintain."

Akeyless is the only platform to offer a true zero-knowledge Secrets Management as-a-Service solution. Akeyless centralizes the management and security of secrets across multi-cloud and DevOps environments. The solution is maintenance-free — with out-of-the-box plugins for existing IT, Dev, and Security tools — and supports enterprise-grade capabilities like disaster recovery, high availability, and global scale. The platform provides a unified approach to securing a full range of both machine and human-to-machine secrets, while its ease of use empowers organizations to move fast, without sacrificing security.

"Akeyless solves the pain caused by secrets proliferation in production environments of modern enterprises, which has worsened with the rise in adoption of modern DevOps methodologies, containerized application development, and increasingly global and remote operations,'' said Hareven. "We are proud to be trusted by Fortune 50 companies as well as mid-to-large enterprises, and to provide them with a low total cost of ownership for their secrets management coupled with high adoption among teams."

Akeyless stores customer secrets and makes them easily accessible in all their environments, while its patented Distributed Fragments Cryptography (DFC™) technology makes the secrets inaccessible to anyone besides the customer — Akeyless included. The NIST-certified Zero-Knowledge technology enables the performance of cryptographic operations using fragments of an encryption key, without ever combining the fragments.

Companies moving to Akeyless from existing secret management solutions see an average cost reduction of 70%. This has driven a 350% growth in revenue over the past year, with Akeyless now being trusted to safeguard the secrets of leading companies across a wide range of industries including Wix.com, Cimpress-VistaPrint, Outbrain and Stash.

"Akeyless' platform approach, superb technology and service excellence made it easy for us to decide to rip and replace our existing secrets management solution," said Daniel Fabbo, Senior Manager Information Security at Cimpress-VistaPrint. "We immediately saw a massive reduction in costs, but the biggest returns came from lowering maintenance to virtually zero. Our partnership with Akeyless is expanding every day, and we are excited to embrace their new offerings for Secure Remote Access and Data Protection."

"With limited security expertise, staff, and budgets, companies were forced to choose between impossibly expensive and labor-intensive solutions or compromising on security," said Shai Onn, Chairman, President and co-founder of Akeyless. "With this latest funding, we will further enable mid-to-large enterprises to operate safely in cloud environments in the midst of an increasingly sophisticated and aggressive cyber landscape."

"Akeyless is poised to dominate the immense and hugely underserved Secrets Management market, and we believe that their growth will continue at an exponential rate. We are excited to partner with Akeyless's team and participate in their journey to make Akeyless Vault the platform of choice for growing businesses across industries," said Christian Noske, Partner at NGP Capital.

"Customers worldwide are ripping and replacing legacy secrets management systems with Akeyless' secure cloud-based vault platform," said Liran Grinberg, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Team8. "Akeyless is redefining secrets management, empowering customers with seamless migration, streamlined operations, superior security, and significantly reduced TCO (total cost of ownership). We're proud to be backing the world's leading and fastest growing Secrets-Management-as-a-Service platform."

"At JVP, we've been strong believers in the Akeyless vision since day one. The company solves, once and for all, the critical challenge of secrets management in enterprise environments, and it is clear the company will continue to grow dramatically" said Yoav Tzruya, General Partner, JVP. "Akeyless provides the required next step in secret management platforms, protecting hundreds of millions of secrets for Fortune 500 customers, across industries. Customers enjoy an innovative, highly secure, 24x7, zero-trust, secrets management-as-a-service, offering unprecedented security, availability, performance and cost advantages, allowing CISOs and CIOs peace of mind, protecting their IT Infrastructure machine Identities. At JVP, it is clear Akeyless is providing the next step in the category, and is the next category leader, after companies such as CyberArk, which we helped lead, to become a $6bn company. We are delighted to welcome NGP Capital to the team as we work together to make Akeyless the category leader in the large secret management market."

About NGP Capital

NGP Capital is a global venture capital firm with over $1.6 billion under management. The VC invests in high-growth technology companies within the Edge Cloud, Cyber Security, Digital Industry, and Digital Transformation. NGP Capital backs entrepreneurs in building a responsible and inclusive world where the confluence of sensors, software, and cloud solutions will connect people and industries in new ways, transforming how we live and work. Since 2005 NGP Capital has invested in more than 100 companies, 19 of these have achieved unicorn status. NGP Capital is active in the U.S., Europe, and China. Visit www.ngpcap.com for more information.

About Team8 Capital

Team8 Capital is the investment arm of Team8 Group, backing early-stage companies in cyber, fintech, data and enterprise technologies, at Seed and Series A funding rounds. We have a track record in backing future leaders and pioneering new-generation solutions to meet critical industry challenges. Team8 Capital offers a unique combination of deep domain expertise and decades of company-building and investing experience and is ready to provide our portfolio companies with a springboard to success. Team8's leadership team includes unicorn founders, bank and fintech CEOs, and former leaders of Unit 8200, Israel's elite military technology and intelligence agency. For further information, please visit www.team8.vc.

About JVP

JVP, founded in 1993 by Dr. Erel Margalit, is an internationally renowned VC fund. Among the pioneering firms of the Israeli VC industry. Over the years JVP has built over 160 companies and has been listed numerous times by Preqin, as one of the top-ten consistently performing VC firms worldwide. JVP has been instrumental in building some of the world's largest companies to emerge, facilitating 12 IPOs on NASDAQ, including CyberArk Software (NASDAQ: CYBR, $4.7 billion mkt. cap.), QLIK Technologies (NASDAQ: QLIK, then $4 billion mkt. cap.) as well as many large industry sales. Over the past decade, JVP has spearheaded the creation of international Centers of Excellence, including the AI and Media center in Jerusalem, the Cyber center in Beer Sheva, the Foodtech center in the Galilee, and the International Cyber and Climate-tech center in NYC, in partnership with NYC/EDC, the leading universities of the city and MINI by BMW. JVP is currently in the process of developing new centers of excellence in Europe, as well as in the Gulf, that will be a new chapter for Israeli technologies to engage with the region. For further information, please visit www.jvpvc.com.

About Akeyless Security

Akeyless is a fast-growing cybersecurity company serving mid-to-large enterprises. Akeyless was founded in 2019 by Shai Onn, Refael Angel, and Oded Hareven with the vision to protect and manage any secret in any environment. Named by Gartner in several reports related to the growing need to secure machine and workload identities, Akeyless has been acknowledged by F500 customers and cybersecurity influencers as the leading solution for secret management in DevOps and cloud environments. Investors in Akeyless include JVP, Team8, and NGP Capital.

For more information, please visit Akeyless at Akeyless.io, or via LinkedIn

Media contact:
Rob Young, Marketing VP
[email protected]
+1 508-816-2729

SOURCE Akeyless Security