Axiom Emerges from Stealth with $7 Million, Unveils its Automated IAMOps Platform to Transform Cloud Access

Axiom emerged from stealth, launching its IAM platform and announcing $7 million in Seed funding led by S Capital alongside notable angel investors.

Software may be eating the world, but there is something eating engineering productivity and posing growing cybersecurity risks for organizations: Identity and Access Management (IAM). While engineering teams are stuck waiting to get the access they need to deliver software that powers business, Security and IT teams are overwhelmed with the operational overhead around IAM while trying to achieve and maintain least privilege.

The sprawl of developer platforms across a multitude of clouds has created a meandering landscape. As a result, the IAM best practice of least privilege is nearly impossible to scale. Security and IT teams are forced to make critical access decisions without context and to manage provisioning with endless orchestration between users, groups, and permissions, often neglecting to correctly prune permissions when they are no longer needed.

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This is the challenge Itay Mesika and Ilan Dardik set out to face with Axiom. Having met during their military service in the Israeli air force in 2013, Mesika and Dardik subsequently worked in several industry roles and led teams in FinTech and infrastructure companies. Adding business experience to their engineering background gave them insights they are now leveraging in the Axiom IAMOps platform.

“We experienced the cloud and SaaS authorization problems that many companies consistently struggle with first-hand,” said Axiom co-founder and CEO Itay Mesika. “We developed a user-friendly platform that automatically orchestrates cloud and SaaS IAM operations to scale least privilege while minimizing operational overhead and friction.”

Axiom’s IAMOps platform supports and integrates with a multitude of developer productivity and collaboration platforms across clouds. Supported clouds include AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. Supported platforms include identity providers such as Okta, Azure AD, Jumpcloud, and Google Workspaces; databases and analytics platforms such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake, and Databricks; infrastructure services such as Kubernetes; source code controls like GitHub, Gitlab, and Bitbucket; and collaboration platforms such as Slack, Jira, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Teams. Axiom is already working in production environments with companies ranging from mid-market to Fortune 500.

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“Existing IAM solutions mostly focus on post-mortem visibility of the issues or access to the same overprivileged roles,” said Axiom co-founder and CTO Ilan Dardik. “Axiom brings a holistic approach to make authorization seamless, scalable, and secure.”

• Seamless: Elastically provides end users the right access at the right time at the click of a button. Axiom offers just-in-time personalized access in a self-service manner, tightly integrated with Slack or other collaboration tools users love to work with.
• Scalable: Empowers security and IT professionals to scale authorization at the speed of cloud. Axiom automatically orchestrates IAM operations to scale cloud access with granular approval workflows. Low-risk use cases can be automatically approved, while the rest are routed with enriched context to the right approvers.
• Secure: Provides centralized entitlements visibility of Cloud IAM so security teams can see, understand, and secure IAM with actionable context. Axiom helps you connect the entitlements dots to control who can and should take what action on which assets or resources.

“Two megatrends are colliding to change the way we work,” said Haim Sadger, founding partner at S Capital (and founder of Sequoia Israel). “The evolution of the Cloud, where infrastructure has become far more elastic and scalable than ever, and the evolution of the workforce, where continued adoption of a hybrid IT model has made identity the new perimeter. Axiom works at the intersection of those megatrends to enable a new era of productive security for everyone.”

“There is something magical about setting up secure by default least privileged IAM workflows and getting out of the way to reduce risks without giving up on developer productivity,” said Srinath Kuruvadi, head of cloud security at Netflix as well as an Investor and strategic advisor in Axiom. “Axiom has a developer-friendly solution to seamlessly offer this fantastic capability.”

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