Cybersecurity startup Aembit launches with $16.6m funding to bring identity-first security to workloads

Aembit, the identity platform that lets DevOps and Security teams discover, manage, enforce, and audit access between federated workloads, announced its official launch alongside $16.6 million in seed financing from cybersecurity specialist investors Ballistic Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures.

The company was recently recognized as a Cool Vendor in the 2022 Gartner® Cool Vendors™ in Identity-First Security report¹. Aembit helps companies apply a zero trust security framework to workload access, similar to existing solutions for workforce access, by providing seamless and secure access from workloads to the services companies depend on, like APIs, databases, and cloud resources.

David Goldschlag, CEO, Aembit: "We see ourselves in our customers because we have been in their shoes. We're excited to be able to offer a solution that makes secure access easy and scalable for DevOps and Developer teams, while giving Security teams visibility and audit capabilities."

Application architecture has radically changed in the past decade. Applications used to be monolithic and standalone, but are now distributed worldwide, and include APIs, databases, SaaS services, and partner workloads. As applications become more distributed and complex, DevOps and Security teams face the difficult challenge of scaling secure access, giving security teams visibility, and ensuring developers can focus on building business-critical functionality.

Inadequate management of workload identities, access, and privileges are a fundamental cause of security breaches. Two relevant examples include the recent T-Mobile breach, in which data affiliated with 37 million customer accounts was stolen through an exploited API, and the recent CircleCI breach, in which a system breach prompted the company to urge its customers to rotate their secrets.

Mark Hatfield, Co-founder and General Partner, Ten Eleven Ventures: "At Ten Eleven, we're always looking for innovations that can make cybersecurity implementation more seamless and comprehensive for organizations. Identity is now understood to be foundational for securing human access, and now is the time to use Identity to secure non-human access too. The Aembit founders are the team most uniquely suited to solving this important challenge. We can't wait to see them grow their product and company over the next few years." 

Aembit solves the problem of secure access between workloads with a cloud-based platform that is easy for DevOps and Security teams to deploy and frictionless for developers to adopt, letting teams focus on managing access, not secrets. Aembit's pioneering approach leverages new techniques, such as secretless authentication and credential providers, as well as no-code integrations to simplify secure access for developers. With Aembit, teams can facilitate safe application development and delivery in today's distributed application environment, including the following use cases:

• Secure access between workloads and custom APIs, API gateways, or APIs from third-party SaaS providers;
• Secure access between workloads and databases, data warehouses, and data lakes; and
• Secure access between workloads in multi-cloud environments.

Jake Seid, Co-founder and General Partner, Ballistic Ventures: "Enterprises have spent significant resources securing the connections between people and the software they use. However, as businesses move to the cloud, a new and fast growing attack surface has emerged. The mesh of workload-to-workload connections created when software talks to other software need to be identified, secured and managed. Aembit is defining this new category of Workload IAM to defend enterprises' most critical digital assets. It's been an honor to work with the Aembit founders since day 1 and to continue to support them on their journey." 

www.aembit.io