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September 12, 2023

Why we invested in AuthMind

The rise of identity SecOps

By Jake Seid, Co-founder and General Partner

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re leading the Seed Round in AuthMind, a company pioneering a new architectural approach to how the identity attack surface is protected. We’re joined in this investment by our friends at IBM and a group of incredible angel investors from the cybersecurity community.

We were particularly drawn to AuthMind due to the strong founder-market fit, their vision for Identity SecOps, and the significant market opportunity. In an incredibly capital efficient way prior to our investment, they achieved early product-market fit and industry recognition from Gartner.

AuthMind’s vision and approach to Identity SecOps is not only holistic but also offers customers something few cybersecurity products do: the ability to be more secure AND the ability for a customer’s engineering and business teams to move faster by realizing the full benefits of cloud and SaaS solutions. Many times we see security products forcing customers to trade off these two important objectives.  

We believe that identity will become the new endpoint, and Identity SecOps has the potential to bring about a transformation as significant as Crowdstrike’s impact on endpoint security. But first, let’s delve into the basics.

Understanding the Identity Surface and the Growing Security Opportunity

Perhaps overly simplified, the identity surface refers to how anything that uses any software is identified by that software as a valid user.

In the past, it was straightforward, with IT organizations overseeing applications, infrastructure, and security tools, resulting in a small, centralized, knowable and manageable attack surface (i.e., the good ol’ days).

However, the shift to cloud and SaaS has fragmented identity, leading to an attack surface that is very large and very brittle. In this new world, DevOps and engineering now manage ever-changing and software-defined infrastructure, while business units own critical applications and adopt these architectures to get their work done as quickly as possible so that the business can be productive. Not to mention, in this new world, machine identities are being created at an even faster pace than human identities.   

In this highly fragmented landscape, these different groups control their respective identity surfaces to enable swift operations. Yet, IT and security organizations are still accountable for securing these surfaces.

The Consequences and the Need for a Solution

This reality has led to a dilemma for enterprises: either allow engineering and business to move fast and risk breaches, or prioritize security and hold back revenue generators. Stats highlight the severity of this challenge:

  • 74% of employees admitted they would bypass cybersecurity guidance to achieve business objectives (source: Gartner 2022 survey).
  • 90% of organizations experienced at least one identity-related breach in the last year (source: IDSA 2023 survey). 
  • 71% of survey respondents said that the most common user complaint from managing identity is poor integration with new tools and applications, and getting help for these issues requires time and resources from support (source: 2022 Radiant Logic survey).

Introducing AuthMind: The Solution for Identity SecOps

AuthMind enables security organizations to protect the identity surface AND enable engineering and business teams to move fast. 

Whether your enterprise is born in the cloud or moving to the cloud, AuthMind has built a unique architecture for Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) and Identity Security Posture Management (ISPM), eliminating the false choice between speed and security. AuthMind’s vision for Identity SecOps is a platform that enables enterprises to have both – regardless of whether they were born in the cloud or are anywhere along their journey in moving to the cloud.

At Ballistic, we believe the most fundamental security products are also ones that help organizations drive more revenue and be more competitive. That’s the vision and architecture behind AuthMind’s Identity SecOps product. 

Security products shouldn’t inhibit business. Accelerating business shouldn’t make you insecure. Too many security products force that dilemma on organizations and ultimately make organizations less secure, and at a much slower pace.

We proudly support AuthMind and its founders in their pursuit of a new vision and architecture for Identity SecOps – one that maximizes the business benefits of cloud and SaaS while ensuring best-of-breed security for organizations.