The pitch sounded almost too practical to work.
While much of the cybersecurity world chases flashy zero-trust architectures and AI-powered threat detection, Way Security—an Israeli startup that emerged from stealth in July 2026—is tackling something decidedly less glamorous: the messy, expensive work of actually making enterprise identity systems function as advertised.
On July 27, 2026, the Tel Aviv-based company announced it had raised $20 million in seed funding, co-led by Insight Partners and Glilot Capital. The round caps roughly a year of quiet development since Way's 2025 founding, during which the startup signed what it claims are "dozens" of paying customers, including some Fortune 500 accounts across financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing.
It's a sizable bet on a problem that doesn't generate many headlines but burns through plenty of corporate budgets: the gap between purchasing identity and access management software and getting it to actually work.
The Execution Gap
Yossi Barishev, Way's CEO and co-founder, frames the challenge bluntly. "The issue isn't that enterprises lack the right tools," he said around the announcement. "They're expensive and complex to operationalize. We built Way to remove that friction."
Barishev would know something about complex security operations. He previously led the security function at Fireblocks, where—according to the company's claims—he helped secure transactions involving over $10 trillion in digital assets. His co-founder, Yonatan Rosenberg, brings credentials from Israel's elite Unit 8200 intelligence unit. The two crossed paths earlier at Sygnia, a cyber incident response firm that handles some of the messiest breaches in corporate computing.
Their shared observation? Most IAM implementations cost three to five times the software license fees in consulting work, customization, and ongoing operational overhead. Way's pitch is essentially to automate that layer.
The platform positions itself as what the founders call an "integration layer that enforces identity everywhere." In practice, that means connecting to an organization's existing identity providers, governance tools, and privileged access systems—then extending those controls to the legacy and homegrown applications that traditional IAM platforms often can't reach without extensive manual configuration.
Think single sign-on deployment, multifactor authentication enforcement, user lifecycle management, and periodic access reviews across an entire application estate. The unglamorous plumbing work.
Way uses what it describes as "agentic workflows" to handle these tasks, though the company has disclosed few technical specifics about how those workflows actually function or what differentiates them from competing orchestration approaches. Rosenberg offered a telling framing: "Most IAM teams aren't looking to replace existing platforms. They want the ROI they were promised. We automate the work between purchase and realized value."
Perhaps the most interesting detail? Way is reportedly partnering with some of the larger identity platform vendors themselves to help deploy their products—essentially white-labeling its automation layer to solve a problem those vendors haven't fully cracked internally. The company declined to name specific partners.
A Crowded Field With Room to Run
The identity and access management market is both enormous and fragmented. Grand View Research projects the sector will reach $29.7 billion this year and climb to $62.9 billion by 2033, driven by regulatory pressure, cloud migration, and the expanding attack surface around identity-based threats.
But Way isn't directly competing with established players like Okta, SailPoint, or Saviynt, which dominate the upstream identity and governance layers. Nor is it positioning against newer orchestration-focused entrants like Strata Identity. Instead, the company is carving out what it hopes is a defensible niche: pure operationalization at scale.
Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Partners, pointed to precisely this operational challenge as the investment thesis. "Identity is critical, but operationalizing investments is hard," he said. "Way addresses the gap between IAM software and execution."
Nofar Amikam, managing partner at Glilot Capital, offered the standard investor optimism about team and timing. "We believe Way can define next-generation enterprise identity operations," Amikam said.
Whether that optimism proves warranted depends partly on market timing. Forrester's workforce identity security platforms report from May noted vendors expanding capabilities around machine and AI agent identity governance—a trend that could either create more demand for operationalization tools or push the platform vendors to solve these problems themselves. Gartner's recent IAM predictions emphasized reducing credential compromise and improving identity visibility, both areas where operational gaps currently create vulnerabilities.
What Comes Next
Way plans to use the funding to expand its U.S. commercial presence and continue building out the platform. The company currently employs around 30 people, according to Hebrew business publication Bizportal, though that headcount will presumably grow with the capital infusion.
The $20 million seed round—sizable by any measure—represents Way's first disclosed funding and its total capital raised to date.
The real test will come in proving that enterprises actually want to buy a separate layer for operationalizing their identity investments rather than simply demanding better functionality from their existing vendors. That's a market positioning bet, and not an obvious one.
But if Barishev and Rosenberg are right about the scale of the execution gap, there may be room for a company focused purely on closing it. The alternative—armies of consultants billing by the hour—isn't exactly popular in procurement departments.
For now, Way has the runway to find out whether unglamorous automation can build a glamorous business.
