Maryland-based startup AuthMind, dedicated to safeguarding businesses from identity-related cyberattacks, has successfully completed an $8.5 million seed funding round, led by Ballistic Ventures and with strategic involvement from IBM Ventures.
Founded by CEO Shlomi Yanai and CTO Ankur Panchbudhe, both of whom have previously established and sold several security startups, AuthMind was initiated in 2020 to make a significant impact in the burgeoning identity security sector. Yanai explained that the inspiration for AuthMind arose from extensive discussions with identity and cybersecurity experts, who consistently expressed frustration that despite significant investments in identity security solutions, hackers were still gaining access.
AuthMind offers a solution to address this issue by assisting companies in fortifying their identity surface and promptly identifying real-time attacks and vulnerabilities. One of its key capabilities involves analyzing a company’s network flow. Yanai emphasized that AuthMind can build a comprehensive view of a company’s cloud, on-premises, SaaS apps, password managers, and more, even without prior knowledge of the company’s identities and directories. This is achieved by closely examining the flow activity and understanding the role of identity in these operations.
By bringing identity context to various aspects of a company’s cybersecurity infrastructure and network, AuthMind plays a crucial role, especially in post-incident investigations.
Jake Seid, co-founder and general partner at Ballistic Ventures, who has invested in prominent companies like Brex, Data Robot, Carta, Drata, and Zipline, believes that the security perimeter has expanded from the network to identity. He commended AuthMind’s vision of identity SecOps, which focuses on not only protecting identity but also addressing misconfigurations and post-breach detection and response.
IBM Venture’s George Mina shared a similar view, highlighting AuthMind’s ability to leverage AI for correlating network flows with event logs to detect and visualize threats across hybrid environments.
AuthMind’s journey began in 2020, working closely with design partners to refine its solution. Yanai mentioned that these initial design partners eventually became paying customers. Today, AuthMind serves numerous customers managing tens or even over 100,000 identities across their networks, primarily in sectors such as insurance, manufacturing, and retail, though their identities remain confidential.
Moving forward, AuthMind plans to enhance its go-to-market efforts and explore additional security-related areas it can address, including assisting customers with security audits for various certifications. Concurrently, the company will continue to refine its core technologies.
