Coming out of stealth today, Boston and Tel Aviv-based startup Rezonate announced a $8.7 million seed funding round led by State of Mind Ventures and Flybridge with participation from toDay Ventures, Merlin Ventures, and a number of angel investors. The company provides an agent-less cloud identity protection platform designed to reduce the likelihood of cloud identity and access breaches by DevOps teams.

Rezonate was founded in January 2022, making it part of a new wave of identity and access management (IAM) businesses that are trying to bring the field up to speed with the needs of today’s advanced cloud-based information systems. New vulnerabilities are emerging as a result of this transition, especially as businesses increasingly adopt cloud computing and other forms of dynamic infrastructure. Already, problems with identity and access management are the cause of an increasing number of security breaches. Actually, “75% of security problems” will be due to poor IAM by 2023, according to Gartner.

Roy Akerman, CEO and co-founder, and Ori Amiga, CTO and co-founder, both served as heads of R&D for the Israeli Cyberdefense Operations before starting their respective companies. Both were honoured with the country of Israel’s highest decoration for valour because of their service to the country.

Akerman has said that a new method is necessary due to the ever-shifting nature of the cloud and the increasing number of unique identifiers for both humans and machines. “To protect today’s critical infrastructure, we need a method that is both accurate and quick. One that places cloud identities and access at its centre, favours real-time updates over historical snapshots, and finally arms defenders and developers with the tools they need to take decisive action.

Rezonate guarantees to identify all of an organization’s cloud and identity providers, as well as each employee’s permissions with respect to those providers. When vulnerabilities or unauthorised attempts to access the system are detected, the platform notifies administrators immediately. In only a few short minutes after installing their solution, Rezonate claims its platform will be able to detect vulnerabilities in cloud identity and access, provide advice on how to fix them, and even shut down affected accounts and sessions immediately.

Rezonate’s “Identity Storyline” is at the heart of this, with the intention of providing DevOps and security teams with a context-rich dashboard to better understand the security risk across a company’s cloud estate. A user-friendly dashboard is provided, making it simple to see who has access to what and where problems may arise.

“The fact that in just ten months from our first line of code we already have active customers, solving key gaps daily, affirms the criticality of the cloud identity and access issue. In a cloud world where everything is changing all of the time, DevOps teams need a solution as dynamic and automated as the infrastructure they need to protect is,” said Amiga.