PlainID, which today announced a $75 million series C funding round, said it has expanded the customer base by 80% this year for its software that simplifies the management of identity and access policies. The company now counts nearly 100 enterprises as customers for the platform, which centralizes the oversight of identity and access management (IAM) policies in order to dramatically improve efficiency and security, PlainID’s founders told VentureBeat.

In 2022, PlainID intends to integrate with additional cloud platforms and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications while adding to a customer base that currently includes SAP, Accenture, EY, and The World Bank, the founders said. Key partners include major identity security vendors such as Okta and SailPoint, as well as public cloud market share leader Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Identity sprawl

Management of digital identities and access policies is notoriously difficult for enterprises, with many suffering from so-called “identity sprawl.” A recent study commissioned by One Identity found that nearly all organizations — 95% — report challenges in digital identity and access management.

At PlainID, “our customers are enterprises, and they have hundreds of places they need to manage access in. It’s spread all around,” said Gal Helemski, cofounder and chief technology officer at PlainID, in an interview. “We enable them to consolidate the management and control over all of those different technology stacks in regards to authorizations.”

The company’s platform enables customers to get dynamic and fine-grained control, giving them greater visibility and allowing them to analyze their access policies with far greater ease, Helemski said. “You’re able to ask questions— ‘what can this user access?’ or ‘who can access my financial reports?’—in a much easier way,” she said.

While vendors such as Okta excel at identity authentication—verifying a user’s identity and “opening the door” to an application—PlainID is focused on what happens after that, Helemski said. The company’s platform controls the authorization of users as they seek to interact with different digital assets, data, and services. PlainID provides a central policy management layer that can control who has access to what, the company’s founders said.

“Now the user is authenticated, but which services can they consume? Which data can they consume? What can they do with that data?” said Oren Ohayon Harel, cofounder, and CEO of PlainID. “The data and the services are scattered in many different apps, on-prem, in the cloud. It’s everywhere. And the ability to control in one single platform, who can do what—that’s where we are positioned.”

Zero trust

This harmonizes with the concept of zero-trust security, which holds that users shouldn’t be trusted perpetually just because they managed to get inside an application, the company’s founders said. “It’s not enough anymore just to open the door to the applications. You must provide much tighter control over the entire journey,” Helemski said.

The PlainID engine enables real-time decisions about what a user is authorized to do according to the context of the user, according to the company. This can include factors such as the user’s location, time of the day, device security posture, IP address, or “basically any piece of data that the customers want to apply [to] the policy,” Harel said. “This is a big shift from a security and identity perspective.”

PlainID’s platform is driven in part by AI-powered automation, which assists by analyzing existing authorization data that a customer has in place—and then suggesting ideal policies from that analysis, the founders said. For instance, for one recent customer, the platform analyzed 6,000 different policies and was able to recommend how to reduce those down to about 200 policies, according to the company.

The platform ultimately provides a “policy-based access control” approach, which “brings efficiency and bring visibility into the connection between identities on one side to digital assets on the other side,” Helemski said.

With the new funding round, the founders said that product development goals for 2022 will include integrations with Microsoft Azure, Snowflake, and “leading SaaS platforms” that are not being disclosed currently.

API management partners that PlainID has integrated with so far include Apigee, Kong, and Evnoy.

Growth funding

The series C round was led by Insight Partners, with participating investments from Viola Ventures, Lightricks cofounder Itai Tsiddon, and “all other existing investors,” PlainID said. The company’s valuation was not disclosed.

PlainID—whose existing backers include INcapital Ventures, Capri Ventures, iAngels, Springtide Ventures, and Vintage Investment Partners—has now raised $100 million since its founding in 2014.

The round followed a year that saw 100% growth in annual recurring revenue, an expansion from about 50 enterprise customers to nearly 100, and the appointment of a senior executive team. Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, and New York City, PlainID now employs 75 and plans to double its team in the next six to nine months.

Prior to founding PlainID, Helemski was an early member of the team at identity security and access management vendor CyberArk, while Harel was deputy chief information security officer at Bank Hapoalim, one of the largest banks in Israel.