A year-long journey to Opti

About two years ago, I was talking with Mille & Ido, whom I’ve been blessed to work with for the past two decades. We were looking at the emergence of GenAI and LLMs, and like many others, saw the huge potential in combining advanced natural language with agentic capabilities. 

The new AI models were impressive and had encyclopedia-worthy knowledge, but something was missing. Having worked with the major enterprises worldwide, we immediately understood that a huge gap exists between the current capabilities that are out there and what enterprise practitioners actually need.

We set out on a year-long journey to figure out how to take agentic capabilities to the next level and identify the most glaring challenges of current security programs. 

Launching Opti's AI-native identity platform

Today marks the next step of our exciting journey building Opti, as we officially announce our $20M seed round and the availability of our AI-native identity platform.

Whether your focus is ISPM & IVIP - where Opti uniquely brings risk remediation into the mix, or intelligence for access administration, we help address pressing identity challenges. A more efficient and productive user access review process is always a fan favorite, and we’re also future-proofed and ready to help you manage your internal AI agent fleet. 

I’m excited to share more about how we got here and why we shaped our mission for the next decade the way we did.

Leverage what you’ve learned and earned 

Back in 2015, when we founded Indegy as young entrepreneurs, we had to anticipate where the industry was headed and do our best to build the right product for our target audience. We were fortunate to be on the right trajectory, working with global enterprises across multiple sectors, which eventually led to Indegy’s acquisition by Tenable in 2019. 

With Opti, we had the privilege of leveraging our experience and network, and were adamant about maximizing the effect of both. We interviewed over 100 security leaders in various industries to identify the biggest problems they face in helping their organizations stay both secure and productive.  

We heard plenty of answers about ‘trendy’ and quick-to-adopt technologies, but for us, it was critical to build in a space that can truly support a meaningful company, not just a set of features that would end up in another cybersecurity product. 

Identity is the heart 

Identity and Access Management (IAM) kept coming up again and again (and again!) as a major challenge at nearly every company we spoke with. In one discussion, the main concern was risk from overprivileged access, in another, it was maintaining least privilege when onboarding employees. A third emphasized the lack of intelligence and context in identity tickets, and almost everyone spoke about how recertification is frustratingly slow and inefficient.  

This is when two things became clear for Opti: 

1. Different identity processes even when handled by different departments or teams, are all based on the same concepts, workflows and programs. Therefore, they all require similar types of intelligence and context, and should all be managed and visible in a single unified platform.  

2. Identity decisions and insights are exactly where LLMs can add real value. Not in their current generic form, where they are good at a number of things - but rather, we need them to excel specifically in IAM. 

After reaching these realizations, we spent the next year building our data scientist team, which solely focused on developing a set of specialized AI models dedicated to enterprise identity workflows. 

The team behind Opti

Opti is built by a tight team of experienced engineers, data scientists, and identity practitioners who have shipped security products at scale for decades. We work in small squads focused on security, identity, and ML so that every feature pairs a domain expert with a researcher and an engineer.

Our culture is hands-on and customer-obsessed: we shadow security analysts, system admins, sit in ticket queues, and run weekly “red team” reviews to break our own flows. That’s how we keep the bar high and ship pragmatic innovation. 

Looking ahead 

We have a long journey ahead of us in building the operating system for IAM. We’re excited for the next chapter in agentic systems where we finally can deliver the intelligent and adaptive automation we’ve all been waiting for. In the coming months we will continue to release additional unique capabilities around executing least-privilege principles continuously in the modern enterprise together with groundbreaking research on how Identity programs are automatically tuned to your stack and people-specific needs.  

We couldn’t be more grateful to our early adopters and investors, who made everything come together in the past year. We’re excited to see what’s next in our journey, together with YL Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Hetz Ventures, Squared Circle, Maple Capital, and LocalGlobe.