A New York startup thinks it has solved the Achilles' heel of enterprise secrets management—and some deep-pocketed investors are willing to wager it's right.
When cryptographic keys sit in a single vault, no matter how fortified, they become a high-value target. Break in once, and the kingdom falls. It's a vulnerability that has haunted cybersecurity teams for years, and one that Akeyless Security believes it has fundamentally redesigned around.
On November 16, 2022, the company closed a $65 million Series B round—$45.5 million in equity, $19.5 million in debt—bringing its total capital raised to $80 million. NGP Capital led the round, with Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners returning from earlier investments.
The funding arrives at a moment when the company claims 350% year-over-year revenue growth and a customer base that includes two of the Fortune 5, along with household names like Wix, Outbrain, Cimpress, Constant Contact, and pharmaceutical giants it won't name publicly. For a three-year-old startup operating out of New York and Tel Aviv, that's traction—though whether it's sustainable in an increasingly crowded market is another question entirely.
The Technical Gamble
Akeyless built its cloud-native platform around what it calls Distributed Fragments Cryptography, a patented, FIPS 140-2 validated architecture that does something unusual: it splits cryptographic key fragments across multiple geographic regions, with one fragment held exclusively by the customer. Crucially, those fragments never recombine. It's zero-knowledge by design, meant to eliminate what CEO Oded Hareven and his co-founders—President and Chairman Shai Onn, and CTO Refael Angel—see as the Achilles' heel of traditional vault systems.
The approach isn't without skeptics. Distributed systems introduce complexity, and complexity is the enemy of security. But in enterprise environments where machine identities (API keys, certificates, tokens) now outnumber human credentials by orders of magnitude, the old vault model is starting to show its age.
Enterprise Credentials
The addition of Mike Christenson to both the cap table and the board signals where Akeyless is headed. Christenson, the former COO and President of New Relic and CA Technologies, brings enterprise software DNA—the kind of pedigree you bring on when you're preparing to scale into six- and seven-figure contracts with IT departments that move slowly and demand white-glove service.
"This isn't a product you sell with a slick demo and a credit card form," one venture investor not involved in the deal observed. "You're displacing entrenched infrastructure. That takes capital, patience, and people who know how to navigate procurement."
The inclusion of $19.5 million in debt alongside the equity raise is telling. Debt is less common in early-stage cybersecurity rounds, where dilution concerns typically take a backseat to speed and simplicity. Its presence here suggests confidence—both from Akeyless's existing investors, who presumably helped structure the deal, and from the company itself about near-term revenue visibility. It also hints at the capital intensity of scaling an enterprise go-to-market motion: sales teams, customer success, channel partnerships.
The Long Road Ahead
Founded in 2019 with roughly $3 million in seed funding, Akeyless raised a $14 million Series A in April 2021 before this latest round. The company plans to use the fresh capital to expand its platform, double its global headcount, and accelerate investments across sales, marketing, customer success, and product development—a fairly standard playbook for a company at this stage, though execution is where most stumble.
The competitive landscape isn't getting any easier. CyberArk's $1.54 billion acquisition of Venafi in 2024 underscored just how strategic the secrets and machine identity management category has become. Venture dollars have poured into adjacent players, and the major cloud providers continue to beef up their own native offerings. Akeyless's distributed architecture may offer genuine technical differentiation, but in enterprise security, differentiation alone doesn't guarantee survival.
The Series B gives the company runway to prove its model can scale. Whether $65 million will be enough—or whether Akeyless will need to return to the well before reaching profitability—remains an open question. For now, the growth numbers suggest genuine pull from enterprise buyers. What happens when that initial wave of early adopters plateaus will determine whether this bet on reinventing the vault was prescient or simply premature.
