Today is one of those days where we’re equal parts proud, grateful, and caffeinated. We’re thrilled to share that Venice has raised $33M to help enterprises finally get privileged access right, in a world of cloud, SaaS, automation, and AI.
This funding is an exciting milestone, but also a signal that the industry is ready to move on from access models that were built for a very different era (one with fewer systems, fewer identities, and a lot fewer bots making decisions at machine speed).
Let’s talk about why.
The Model No One Loves (But Everyone Lives With)
For years, privileged access has been managed with a familiar toolbox that included vaults, password rotation, approval tickets, and long-lived permissions that never quite go away, which compiled into environments that are impossible to keep track of.
These systems were designed for on-premises servers with a small, stable group of local admins that rarely changed. Replacing, migrating, or integrating them can take months, so companies keep using them even when they know they're outdated. They stick with them out of fear - fear of breaking things during migration, fear of the cost involved, or because they remember how long it took to get any value from their initial PAM deployment. And while these companies never fully completed that implementation, the thought of starting over can be terrifying.
Bottom line: enterprises today are running dozens of identity and access products at once (for human users, service accounts, APIs, bots, AI agents, temporary contractors, legacy systems, and every new SaaS tool that gets added along the way), stitching together a patchwork where what should be an identity stack becomes an administrative nightmare, and permanent access quietly piles up.
Legacy PAM vs. The Machine Age
Modern enterprises manage much more than people. They manage machines. Pipelines. Workflows. Agents. Autonomous systems. AI tools that can spin up infrastructure and touch sensitive data in seconds. These non-human identities now outnumber human ones, and they’re often the least visible.
Traditional PAM tools weren’t designed for this world. They assume stable environments and predictable users. But today’s access patterns are dynamic, distributed, and automated.
Which means security needs to be dynamic too.
Timely Access = Secure Access
At Venice, what stood out to us early on was how casually standing access becomes part of everyday operations. Permissions are granted for a project, a deployment, a migration, or a quick fix, and then they quietly blend into the background of the organization. Over time, access accumulates faster than anyone can track it, spreads across teams and systems, and ends up disconnected from the business context that justified it in the first place.
So instead of treating privileged access as something to be stored and managed indefinitely, we built Venice around continuous monitoring and real-time control. The platform constantly maps every identity and entitlement across cloud, SaaS, on-prem, and hybrid environments, evaluates what’s happening in the moment, and aligns access with actual operational need. When access is required, it’s granted immediately. When that need disappears, so does the permission.
This approach removes the default assumption that access should be “kept around,” replacing it with a model where privilege exists only in active use.
It also reflects the reality that identity teams live in today. Most are managing a cluster of disconnected tools, each responsible for a different environment or identity type, none offering a complete picture. Venice brings these fragments into a single lifecycle from discovery and authorization to usage, revocation, and audit, spanning human, machine, and AI-driven identities across cloud and on-prem systems.
The result is access that adapts as fast as the business does, stays aligned with real-world activity. It’s the first step towards a unified life cycle identity stack that behaves like a living system instead of a static set of permissions.
Built for Real Enterprises (Yes, the Complicated Ones)
Here's something we heard over and over from enterprises: their privileged access tools worked (sort of), but nobody wanted to use them. Everything ran on heavy, clunky desktop tools, with approval chains that could take hours and interfaces so outdated and confusing that people needed training just to request temporary access. So teams started finding workarounds, permissions piled up and never expired, and security ended up spending more time fighting its own systems than real threats.
We built Venice with a different philosophy: if it's not as easy as sending a Slack message, it's not easy enough. Access requests happen in seconds, and the interface is clean and intuitive. There's no client software to install, and no special training required. When a security tool is frictionless, people actually use it.
We also built Venice as an enterprise product from day one.
That means:
- No heavy agents
- No brittle proxies
- No “call us when you’re ready to scale” disclaimers
- No shortcuts that break at Fortune 500 size
- No more manual audit prep, compliance evidence at the click of a button
Our customers operate massive, hybrid, highly regulated environments. The platform has to work there reliably, globally, and continuously.
And it does.
Why This Round Matters
This funding allows us to do three things we care deeply about:
- Build faster for a world where access changes by the second
- Support more global enterprises at a real operational scale
- Keep pushing the industry away from permanent access models
We’re grateful to our customers, investors, and partners who believe (like we do) that security should move at the speed of modern business.
Looking Ahead
Identity is now the front door to every organization, and privileged access is the master key. In today's world, that key can’t sit under the doormat anymore.
We’re building Venice so that access is always earned, always contextual, and always temporary, whether the “user” is a person, a script, or an autonomous agent.
Thank you to everyone who’s been part of this journey so far.
We’re just getting started.
— The Venice Team
