Akeyless has developed a platform that allows the organization's development, DevOps, and information security teams to manage and protect all manner of secrets. Whether it is encryption keys, slogans, SSH and API access keys, and PKI Certificates, the platform ensures protection, in all work environments for any possible use scenarios.

The Israeli startup said the platform they developed uses a combination of several systems: encryption management systems (KMS, HSM), remote privileged approach management systems (such as PAM, SSH and Zero-Trust), and password management systems and certificates.

Akeyless’ patent technology called DFC – Distributed Fragments Cryptography– allows cryptographic calculations to be performed using parts of encryption keys - without connecting them to an entire key. In doing so, the platform allows you to manage encryption keys securely in cloud environments, where organizations do not manage their hardware infrastructure.

In a conversation with Geektime, Shai Onn, President of the company and one of its founders, said since the company's last recruitment in April 2021, the company has grown significantly in terms of customers and revenue: "Annual revenues increased 15 times, the number of customers increased 7-fold, and the number of employees increased by 3 to a total of 80 employees. We used to have 3 employees working in the U.S and that is up to 40 now."

So what makes Akeyless' product better than Its competitors, like Jashicorp and Cyberark? Oded Haraven, CEO and one of the founders, explained that one of their significant advantages is that they provide a SaaS product that runs directly on the companies' cloud environments, providing them with high availability. Moreover, most of the products on the market today are self-deployed and require the customer to install and maintain the product on their server environment. Since a secret management system should comply with High Availability, meaning if the secrets are not available, the production environment is not available, the customer is required to install several management servers' secrets in several different environments, and perform configurations for synchronizing data between sites. So, essentially that means that client's DevOps teams have to maintain this entire setup on their own including version upgrades, backups, monitoring, and more. In the case of large organizations, an entire team of engineers is required to support these products on an ongoing basis. So the bottom line is that we save compute resources and costs to our customers."

According to him, Akeyless provides its customers with API, SDK, and plugins for the major DevOps platforms on the market so that within a few minutes a DevOps team member can sign up for the service and connect to a Kubernetes cluster or Jenkins server in such a way that he can clean up source code of any secrets. Akeyless will then provide them during the running time when needed. Onn added that "The technology allows us to protect the secrets without us having access to them. It's based on encryption key particles that are created in different areas of the cloud. One particle is in the hands of the customer. When encryption is carried out, the key particles aren't connected to the world. This is how a high level of security is obtained-  the key does not exist anywhere, at no point in time...not even during encryption and decryption. Except for the client himself, no one has the ability to perform encryption and decryption, not even Akeyless itself. That is how we derived the name for the company."

Raised $65 million

Today (Wednesday), Akeyless announces the completion of a $65 million Series B round. The round was led by the NGP Capital Fund, with participation from existing investors and leading Israeli cyber funds: Team8 Capital and JVP. The company's CEO and one of the founders Oded Hareven said that the recruitment was completed as early as last quarter, so they didn’t really feel the effects of the market situation when they went out to raise capital.

Akeyless was founded in 2018 by Shai Onn (Chairman and President), Oded Hareven (CEO) and Rafael Angel (CTO). The company employs about 80 people, half of them at the Tel Aviv Development Center. They plan to use the new capital to continue developing their products while also hiring more employees.