California-based cybersecurity firm Defakto has raised $30.75 million in Series B funding, led by XYZ Venture Capital, bringing its total investment to roughly $50 million. The new capital will power the company’s rapid expansion in product development and global market reach for its identity and access management (IAM) platform—one specifically designed to secure non-human identities like AI agents, services, and workloads.
In a world where automated systems now outnumber human users, enterprises are facing an identity crisis. Traditional IAM tools—built for people, not machines—have left a dangerous gap filled with static credentials and overprivileged service accounts. These outdated security mechanisms create massive attack surfaces, leaving organizations vulnerable to credential theft, supply chain compromise, and insider risk.
Founded by Danny Oliveri and Eli Nesterov, Defakto’s mission is nothing short of transformative: to eradicate secrets entirely. Instead of managing hard-coded credentials or tokens, the company’s platform replaces them with dynamic, just-in-time identities that grant access only when and where it’s needed. This shift fundamentally changes how machine-to-machine authentication operates—turning identity from a liability into an adaptive, policy-driven control mechanism.
Defakto’s technology integrates seamlessly across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hybrid environments, enabling unified control over identity lifecycles regardless of platform. The company’s approach provides a comprehensive control plane for non-human identities, handling their creation, use, and retirement with precision and automation.
The Series B investor lineup reads like a strategic dream team: alongside lead investor XYZ Venture Capital are The General Partnership, Bloomberg Beta, WndrCo, Adverb Ventures, J.P. Morgan, and Michael Coates, former CISO of Twitter. J.P. Morgan’s participation signals strong enterprise demand from regulated sectors like finance, while Coates’ involvement provides crucial technical validation from the CISO community.
CEO Danny Oliveri captures the vision succinctly:
“We didn’t build another tool to give you more visibility or manage secrets. We built a platform to eradicate them—to eliminate overprivileged access and give enterprises the same foundation for machines and AI that IAM gave them for people.”
With this fresh injection of capital, Defakto is doubling down on product innovation and go-to-market execution. Its roadmap centers on supporting new classes of AI agents and automation pipelines while accelerating enterprise adoption through strategic integrations and customer-driven enhancements.
As organizations grapple with the explosion of non-human users, Defakto’s platform is poised to become a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity architecture. By tackling one of the fastest-growing risks in enterprise IT—machine identity sprawl—Defakto’s Series B round positions it to lead a new category in IAM: dynamic, AI-ready identity security for the automated age.
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