AuthMind Raises $8.5 Million from Ballistic, IBM Ventures and Others

Shlomi Yanai

Bethesda, Md.-based AuthMind, which is building an identity protection platform to protect organizations from hackers, has raised $8.5 million in seed funding led by Ballistic Ventures, a West Coast venture firm focused on cybersecurity startups. New York-based IBM Ventures joined the round as a strategic investor, along with some angel investors.

“Hackers don’t hack in, they log in,” said AuthMind founder and CEO Shlomi Yanai, a 25-year cybersecurity industry veteran, alluding to widespread gaps in identity management systems that compromise credentials and enable intrusions.

Neural Network

“The Identity infrastructure is a prime target for hackers despite continuous major investments in identity security,” said Yanai, who has previously led Baltimore-area startups Cyren and DataBlink. “AuthMind solves this problem by detecting in real time the gaps and weaknesses that enable such attacks, while empowering identity and security teams to remediate them quickly.”

Founded in 2020, AuthMind’s technology is based on a patented, AI-based access neural network. In 2022, it was named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Identity-First Security. Its platform “sees” all identities and accesses. This multifaceted feature is critical in the context of widespread use of SaaS and other technologies that have fragmented identity, and enlarged the attack surface. AuthMind says it addresses three common issues exploited in identity-based cyberattacks — blind spots, identity infrastructure security gaps, and misconfigurations and non-compliance.

“Compromised identities are now involved in almost every cyber incident,” said Jake Seid, co-founder and general partner at San Mateo, Calif.-based Ballistic Ventures. In the emerging cybersecurity environment, identity will be the new endpoint, and AuthMind can do for Identity SecOps what Crowdstrike did for endpoint security, he added.

Growing Attack Surface

“AuthMind’s approach is compelling in delivering an Identity SecOps platform that helps security organizations protect this surface, but doing so in a way that allows security organizations to also enable engineering and business teams to move fast,” said Seid, who previously founded Stone Bridge Ventures.

IBM Ventures’ Georga Mina, who heads the venture unit’s security practice, termed AuthMind “the emerging space of ITDR,” or identity threat detection and response.

“We continue to see an expanding attack surface across the identity infrastructure and beyond. AuthMind’s ability to leverage AI to ingest and correlate network flows with event logs enables security teams to detect threats as they happen and visualize attack paths across hybrid environments,” said Mina, a 25-year security industry veteran.