Tech
This former Microsoft PM thinks she can unseat CyberArk in 18 months
The internet today has a permissions problem. As non-humans — chatbots, AI agents, and automated systems — have proliferated on the web, so has the need to provide them with credentials, permissions, and identities. That’s one major reason identity and access management startups that help manage this new kind of digital workforce are raking in venture capital.
Now, a 35-person Israeli-American startup called Venice is emerging from stealth with fresh cash and a plucky claim: that it’s already replacing industry stalwarts like CyberArk and Okta at Fortune 500 companies.
Venice, founded just over two years ago, says it raised $20 million in Series A funding in December, led by IVP, with participation from Index Ventures, which led its earlier seed round.
Unlike many of its well-funded rivals — which include Persona (raised a $200 million Series D last April), Veza (closed a $108 million Series D last May), and GitGuardian SAS (raised $50 million last week) — Venice is tackling both cloud-based and on-premises environments, a technical choice that has made the product harder to build but positioned it to win over the large enterprises still running legacy systems alongside modern cloud infrastructure.
At its helm sits 31-year-old Rotem Lurie, whose path to entrepreneurship pretty much ticks every box on VCs’ checklists. The daughter of two programmer parents in Israel (her mother was one of the country’s first female software engineers), Lurie spent four-and-a-half years as a lieutenant in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite intelligence corps, before joining Microsoft as a product manager working on what would become Defender for Identity.
She later became the first product hire at Axis Security, an access management startup that sold to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $500 million in 2022. Just before that acquisition closed, Lurie left to join YL Ventures, a cybersecurity-focused venture firm.
That brief stint at YL Ventures proved particularly instructive. “Every day, I used to meet a team of three 23-year-old boys,” Lurie says straightforwardly over a Zoom call. “Most of those companies build their technology to be acquired. The entire strategy around what problem you’re solving and how you penetrate the market — it’s a completely different approach.”
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To replace incumbents like CyberArk, which has long dominated the privileged access management market, Lurie realized she’d need to play a longer game. That meant building technology that’s both deep and comprehensive enough to support the complex, hybrid IT environments of most large enterprises.
The technical challenge ahead of Lurie went thus: Most identity and access management teams juggle roughly 10 different tools to manage who and what has access to corporate systems. Venice’s platform consolidates that sprawl into a single system that handles privileged access across on-premises servers, SaaS applications, and cloud infrastructure for humans and non-human entities alike.
“Tying everything together was what mattered to customers the most,” Lurie says. Indeed, Venice operates a SaaS subscription model, but Lurie insists it isn’t competing on price. “We reduce the cost, but it’s not because we go cheap on pricing,” she explains.
“It’s because we spare all the overhead [associated with many of today’s offerings], especially the professional services” — the consultant fees and lengthy implementations that have become an almost unavoidable tax for enterprise security deployments.
The bet appears to be paying off. Lurie says Venice is now “completely replacing” legacy vendors at Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 customers, and cutting implementation time to just a week-and-a-half, from the typical six months to two years, thanks to AI-powered automation. While she declined to name customers on the record, she told TechCrunch off the record that they include a 170-year-old, publicly traded manufacturing giant as well as a global music conglomerate.
Cack Wilhelm, the partner at IVP who led Venice’s Series A, says Lurie stood out. “The problem with most cybersecurity pitches is everyone’s tackling something too small to ever be material,” Wilhelm says. “When you look at the massive exits — CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks — they were doing audacious things from the beginning. Rotem is the same.”
Wilhelm points to the urgency created by AI agents as a key factor driving IVP’s investment thesis. “If every individual is going to have tens of agents working on their behalf, and privileged access tools were built for a static world of IT professionals, we need our identity concept to adjust to that,” Wilhelm said. “Very often, when [companies] are breached, they’re breached by people simply logging in with someone else’s credentials. You solve that with just-in-time permissions that are scoped to the individual and the moment.”
Though crowded, the market seems eager for new solutions. Identity and access management spending was expected to exceed $24 billion in 2025, increasing by 13% from a year earlier, according to an industry group called Identity Management Institute.
Venice’s team is split between Israel, where R&D is based, and North America, where the go-to-market team operates. Notably, nearly half of the cybersecurity company is women, a rarity in one of tech’s most stubbornly male-dominated sectors.
Lurie’s co-founder, Or Vaknin, serves as CTO (he’s pictured with Lurie, above). The company’s investors include Assaf Rappaport, co-founder and CEO of Wiz, and Raaz Herzberg, CMO at Wiz and Lurie’s former colleague from their days as interns at Microsoft.
For Lurie, who says she has spent much of her career as “the only woman in the room,” creating a more balanced team wasn’t a calculated act. “You can never see yourself doing something if you didn’t see someone like you doing it,” she says. “This is something that attracts other women — to feel like they can be part of it.”
The question now is whether Venice’s two-year head start and early Fortune 500 wins will be enough to fend off deep-pocketed competitors as they chase the same enterprise buyers. Can the market support multiple winners? Or, will identity management follow the path of other security categories and consolidate around one or two dominant players?
Tech
Tesla dodges 30-day suspension in California after removing ‘Autopilot’
The California Department of Motor Vehicles will not suspend Tesla’s sales and manufacturing licenses for 30 days because the EV maker has stopped using the term “Autopilot” in the marketing of its vehicles in the state.
The decision, issued late Tuesday, means Tesla can continue selling its EVs in California without interruption and officially settles a case that has been dragging on for nearly three years. California is Tesla’s biggest U.S. market.
In November 2023, the DMV filed accusations that Tesla violated state law by using deceptive marketing of Autopilot, its basic advanced driver-assistance system, as well as its more capable Full Self-Driving driver-assistance software. The state regulator argued that the terms misled customers and distorted the capabilities of the advanced driver-assistance systems.
Tesla stopped using the term “Full Self-Driving Capability” and instead used Full Self-Driving (Supervised) to more accurately describe the system and clarify that drivers were still required to monitor it. But Tesla held on to the Autopilot term, prompting the DMV to refer the case to an administrative law judge at the California Office of Administrative Hearings.
In December, the administrative law judge agreed with the DMV’s request to suspend Tesla’s sales and manufacturing licenses in the state for 30 days as a penalty for its actions. The DMV agreed with the ruling but didn’t pounce; instead, the state regulator gave Tesla 60 days to comply.
“Since then, Tesla took corrective action and has stopped using the misleading term ‘Autopilot’ in the marketing of its electric vehicles in California,” the DMV stated in a release posted on its website. “Tesla had previously modified its use of the term ‘Full Self-Driving’ to clarify that driver supervision is required. By taking this prescribed action, Tesla will avoid having its dealer and manufacturer licenses suspended in the state for 30 days by the DMV.”
Tesla didn’t just stop using the term Autopilot, though. In January, the company discontinued Autopilot in the U.S. and Canada altogether. The move not only helped it comply with the DMV but was also viewed as a way to boost adoption of FSD, which, unlike Autopilot, requires the owner to pay for the upgraded system.
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FSD Supervised, which until February 14 required an $8,000 one-time fee, is now only available through a monthly subscription of $99. That subscription fee is expected to increase as the system becomes more capable, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said.
Tech
U.S. court bars OpenAI from using ‘Cameo’
A federal district court in Northern California ruled in favor of Cameo, a platform that allows users to get personalized video messages from celebrities and ordered OpenAI to stop using “Cameo” in its products and features.
OpenAI was using the “Cameo” name for its AI-powered video-generation app Sora 2. Users could use that feature to insert digital likenesses of themselves into AI-generated videos. In a ruling filed Saturday, the court said the name was similar enough to cause user confusion and rejected OpenAI’s argument that “Cameo” was merely descriptive, finding that “it suggests rather than describes the feature.”
In November, the court granted a temporary restraining order to Cameo and stopped OpenAI from using the word. The AI company then renamed the feature to “Characters” after that order.
“We have spent nearly a decade building a brand that stands for talent-friendly interactions and genuine connection, and we like to say that ‘every Cameo is a commercial for the next one,” Cameo CEO Steven Galanis said in a statement.
“This ruling is a critical victory not just for our company, but for the integrity of our marketplace and the thousands of creators who trust the Cameo name. We will continue to vigorously defend our intellectual property against any platform that attempts to trade on the goodwill and recognition we have worked so hard to establish,” he noted.
“We disagree with the complaint’s assertion that anyone can claim exclusive ownership over the word ‘cameo,’ and we look forward to continuing to make our case,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters in response to the ruling.
OpenAI has been involved in several intellectual property cases in recent months. Earlier this month, the company ditched “IO” branding around its upcoming hardware products, according to court documents obtained by Wired. In November, digital library app OverDrive sued OpenAI over its use of “Sora” for its video-generation app. The company is also in legal disputes with various artists, creatives, and media groups in various geographies over copyright violations.
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Tech
DG Matrix raises $60M to make data center power smarter
Data centers face a conundrum: how to power increasingly dense server racks using equipment that relies on century-old technology.
Traditional transformers are bulky and hot, but a new generation of solid-state transformers promises to address both problems while making power management more flexible.
One solid-state transformer startup, DG Matrix, has raised $60 million in a Series A round, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Engine Ventures led the round with ABB, Cerberus Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Clean Energy Ventures, Fine Structure Ventures, Helios Climate Ventures, MCJ, and Piedmont Capital participating.
The company also recently announced a deal to provide its Interport device to Exowatt, the startup building solar-plus-storage containers to supply data centers with 24/7 electricity.
The Interport device acts as a router for power, Subhashish Bhattacharya, co-founder and CTO of DG Matrix, told TechCrunch. One Interport can handle up to 2.4 megawatts of connections. For example, it could accumulate 600 kilowatts from solar panels and 600 kilowatts from grid-scale batteries to feed power to 12 racks drawing 100 kilowatts each.
Because Interport can integrate electricity from a variety of sources, including large batteries, DG Matrix says it can eliminate uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and the equipment needed to support them.
Altogether, one Interport can cut down the amount of space devoted to power conversion in a data center. Two 4-by-30-foot skids laden with power conversion equipment can be replaced by a single four-by-four-foot Interport device, DG Matrix co-founder and CEO Haroon Inam told TechCrunch.
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By eliminating several devices, the company can boost the system’s overall efficiency. All the legacy devices chained together can achieve about 82% to 90% efficiency, Inam said, while Interport is 95% to 98% efficient. He said that reliability should improve, too. “When you are using only 10%, 15% of the components that legacy is using, you’re going to be far more reliable,” he added.
DG Matrix is in the process of rolling out initial units to customers in June. Its next product will be a sidecar to supply data center racks with power that builds on the technology the company has already developed.
Currently, data centers represent about 90% of DG Matrix’s pipeline, with the remainder devoted to EV charging for fleets. Inam said the next step is to expand into building power and add more capacity to build micro- and mini-grids to support electrification projects in remote communities. There, Interports would orchestrate power from solar, wind, and batteries to provide round-the-clock electricity without a grid connection.
“Nobody’s going to build a $100 million transmission line to a village,” Inam said. “Now you can spend a fraction of that money and help eliminate energy poverty.”
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