Access management startup Oleria lands $33M in funding

Oleria, a startup providing access management tools primarily for enterprise customers, today announced that it raised $33 million in a Series A round led by Evolution Equity Partners with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Tapestry Ventures and Zscaler.

Oleria was co-founded in 2022 by Jim Alkove and Jagadeesh Kunda. Alkove, an ex-Microsoft CVP and former “chief trust officer” at Salesforce, where he met Kunda, says that he’d “long been vexed” by the challenge of delivering cybersecurity while not preventing business partners from doing their jobs.

“So often access to apps and data is insecure due to being over-provisioned and complex to govern, as well as placing unnecessary obstacles in the way of employees — making it challenging to balance security and business agility,” Alkove told TechCrunch in an email interview. “It’s clear that the real solution requires an adaptive and autonomous approach to access — providing just the right access, at the right time, for the right duration.”

Oleria’s solution is a platform that limits what digital assets users can access — for example, which apps they can use — in an organization. Oleria also attempts to identify erroneously-granted permissions and unintended access, making recommendations to remediate access risk.

Oleria, which has raised over $40 million in venture capital to date inclusive of the Series A tranche, hasn’t made its platform generally available yet. The plan is for a GA later in the year — assuming a pilot with select prospective customers goes well.

“Oleria’s biggest competitor today is the status quo,” Alkove said. “CISOs and their teams spend countless hours and resources trying to combat the ever-growing threat of access-related cyber breaches leveraging a combination of legacy systems coupled with significant manual administration and intervention — and aren’t equipped for today’s threat environment … We’ve built and managed enterprise security solutions at scale and also operated global security teams, giving them a unique understanding of these challenges and what it takes to solve them.”