Oleria nets $8M for context-based, adaptive authentication in the enterprise
Adaptive, identity-first security is the way of the future, according to Oleria — the enterprise access management firm that, this week, exited stealth mode and announced $8 million in seed funding in a round led by Salesforce Ventures.
Oleria, which is based in Seattle, was founded by Jim Alkove (formerly of Salesforce) and Jagadeesh Kunda, previously an executive with enterprise software company JumpCloud. It aims to provide enterprises with an alternative to clunky multi-factor authentication (MFA), with a product that promises continuous, consistent, context-based, adaptive ID authentication, using biometric verification and other tools.
In Alkove’s words, “Oleria provides adaptive and autonomous security that scales with businesses and provides the freedom to pursue business objectives, while offering CISOs peace of mind that access is appropriate and risk is minimized.”
Among partner investors in Oleria is Kevin Turner, former COO of Microsoft and CIO of Walmart.
“Businesses are constantly responding to evolving threats and the currently available solutions are cumbersome, costly and ultimately constrain teams from gaining appropriate access to sensitive and relevant business data that they need to achieve critical business outcomes,” he says in Oleria’s release.
Salesforce Ventures investor Kartik Gupta notes Alkove and Kunda’s deep experience with companies such as AWS, Oracle and Nest. “Building a security solution that is not only effective but also flexible and adaptive is a challenge that will take the exceptional experience and vision of the Oleria founders to solve,” he says.
The risk-based authentication (RBA) market, of which adaptive authentication is a part, had an estimated value of almost $5 billion in 2022, according to a report by Adroit Market Research. The report defines RBA as “a non-static authentication system that leverages the profile of the agent requesting access to the system in order to evaluate the risk associated with the transaction.” Digitization and the perpetuation of cloud technology has been a driver in a market that is predicted to double in value in the next six years, to more than $11 billion.
