Apono, the cloud identity-security company pioneering Zero Standing Privilege (ZSP) access management, announced a $34 million Series B led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from Swisscom Ventures, Vertex Ventures, 33N Ventures, and existing investors. The round brings Apono’s total funding to more than $54 million. Over the past year, Apono established product-market fit with a fourfold increase in client count.
Apono’s platform helps enterprises manage the explosion of cloud permissions by eliminating standing privileges, a long-standing vulnerability in identity and access management. Built on Just-in-Time (JIT) and Just-Enough-Access (JEA) models, Apono grants and revokes access dynamically based on real-time context and business logic, ensuring teams can move fast without compromising security.
The company’s vision anticipates a future where human and AI identities coexist and collaborate. As agentic systems proliferate, managing their access requires a level of automation, context-awareness, and scale that static IAM models can’t deliver. Apono’s dynamic permissioning engine meets that challenge by validating every access request in real time, enforcing security without slowing down developers or operations.
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“The large-scale adoption of AI agents exponentially scales the problem of getting access right,” said Rom Carmel, Co-founder and CEO of Apono. “Achieving ZSP with a dynamic access management approach is the only sustainable way to secure Agentic operations at scale.”
Customers, including Intel, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Monday.com, rely on Apono to secure access across hybrid and multi-cloud environments while meeting compliance standards and accelerating incident response.
Jacques Benkoski, General Partner at USVP, will join Apono’s board. A longtime enterprise software investor, Jacques has helped scale leading cybersecurity companies, including Trusteer, Medigate, and Kenna Security. He will work closely with Rom Carmel, Ofir Stein, and the Apono team to help drive the company’s growth and leadership in the emerging field of agentic identity security.
“Apono is leading the next evolution of identity security – one that brings zero trust to identity access, following the zero trust of network access we’ve seen in recent years,” said Jacques Benkoski, General Partner at USVP. “The company’s dynamic, context-aware approach is exactly what enterprises need to secure both human and machine identities in the AI-driven era.”
SOURCE: Apono