Orchid Security Raises $36 Million to Revolutionize Identity Security with AI and LLMs

Orchid Security Raises $36 Million Seed Funding to Bring Clarity to the Complexity of Fragmented Identity Security With LLMs

Backed by Team8, Intel Capital, and Jeff Williams, Orchid Security enables enterprises to achieve continuous visibility, consistent management, and control of their ever-changing identity environment. NEW YORK, January 14, 2025 (Newswire.com) - Orchid Security, an emerging leader in identity-first security orchestration, today announced it has raised $36 million in seed funding. Co-led by Team8 and Intel Capital, with the support of CapitalOne and industry leaders including Jeff Williams (FireEye, Cisco, McAfee), Dror Davidoff (Aqua), and Zohar Alon (Dome9, Check Point). This funding will accelerate Orchid's pioneering work using Large Language Models (LLMs) to address the longstanding challenge of managing fragmented identity systems in large enterprises. With this major infusion of seed capital, Orchid is poised to accelerate the development of its platform, scale up its sales and support teams, and build its marketing engine. Orchid is already working with leading enterprises worldwide, across finance, manufacturing, healthcare, and retail. Its customers include Fortune 500 companies, such as Costco and Repsol. Orchid's platform is designed to tackle a fundamental problem in identity security - its inherent complexity. On average, enterprises handle 1,200 different applications hosted on-premise, in the cloud, or delivered as SaaS. They must navigate a highly fragmented landscape of identity and access management tools that routinely evolve, keep up with identity protocols that continue to improve, remain compliant with changing regulatory requirements, and protect their data amid a dynamic threat landscape. This creates an environment that has been nearly impossible to assess, let alone sustain a strong and consistent identity posture across the organization. Based on data from a leading analyst firm, approximately $5.25 billion is projected to be spent on integration, implementation, optimization, and other services related to identity and access management in 2025. Orchid's Identity-first Security Orchestration platform continuously discovers both self-hosted and SaaS applications, assessing their authentication and authorization flows to highlight exposure and facilitate remediation, ensuring a consistent, standardized posture through the organization's identity stack. Unlike traditional solutions, which rely on manual, lengthy, and costly processes, Orchid's automated platform offers deep application-centric visibility across all environments, delivering a comprehensive, real-time approach to managing identity security. This positions Orchid as a dynamic, scalable, and enterprise-focused alternative to current manual solutions, which often take years to implement and quickly become outdated with any change. With Orchid, customers have achieved a 90% faster onboarding process and a 75% reduction in professional services costs. "Our objective with Orchid is to transform our largely (90%) manual process of onboarding applications - which can take weeks after release from development - to one that is highly (90%) automated and accomplished in just days", said Jon Raper, Costco's CISO. "Orchid greatly improves our speed to delivery for business units." LLMs play a pivotal role in this innovative technology by providing essential identity-related context and reasoning. This empowers the solution to evaluate an application's inherent identity flows and validate the coherence of those assessments, all without requiring access to or changes in the application code. "The latest LLM models include code recognition and reasoning skills that enable understanding of identity flows in running applications without requiring code access or input from the application owners. When prompted correctly, these models go beyond data processing -they comprehend context, make inferences, and deliver accurate decisions. They also provide clear justifications, ensuring the platform's logic remains coherent and transparent." said Roy Katmor, Co-Founder and CEO of Orchid Security. "With advancements in AI and LLM technology, we can now offer a solution that automatically assesses identity capabilities and exposures -considering target regulations, frameworks, and security best practices-offers remediations, and helps organizations elevate and ensure consistency of their identity security posture, all while significantly reducing cost and time." The founding team of Roy Katmor, Robert Wiseman, and Ido Kelson brings a wealth of cybersecurity and identity management expertise. Katmor co-founded enSilo, which was acquired by Fortinet, while Weisman has led identity-focused initiatives at Team8 and Claroty. Kelson, also a co-founder of enSilo, is recognized for his innovative work in endpoint security. Together, they've harnessed AI's power to create a cybersecurity solution that addresses the complexities of modern identity infrastructures. "With Orchid, Team8's venture creation team recognized a unique opportunity to tackle one of the most pressing problems in the identity space. The integration of applications into the identity stack has long been a painful process, leading to limited posture and visibility for security teams", said Amir Zilberstein, Managing Partner at Team8. "With their innovative approach leveraging GenAI, Orchid offers a first-of-its-kind identity fabric. This has been a top priority for our CISO village, and the traction we've seen for Orchid's solution and outstanding founding team has been staggering." "Until now, getting the security benefits of existing identity solutions was a long, costly, and challenging process. Organizations had to locate, prioritize, and integrate all their applications into their identity systems," said Yoni Greifman, Investment Director at Intel Capital. "Orchid changes the game by enabling companies to seamlessly identify, assess, and enhance their applications' identity controls for stronger security and compliance-no coding required." "HUB completes about 65 acquisitions each year, encountering a wide variety of business-critical applications-many lacking native IAM integration capabilities," said Jeremy Embalabala, CISO at HUB International. "Orchid's vision of continuously discovering application authentication and authorization configurations, securing them with key IAM controls like SSO, MFA, and Identity Governance, and providing ongoing security and compliance insights is truly game-changing. By automatically enforcing these controls even when they are not natively available, Orchid is providing a critical and foundational security capability that has traditionally been challenging to achieve. This helps enterprises ensure security and compliance across every application, setting a new standard for the future of enterprise IAM." About Orchid: Orchid Security is an identity security platform leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to unify and secure complex identity environments across enterprises. Founded by AI and cybersecurity experts Roy Katmor, Robert Weisman, and Ido Kelson, and backed by Intel Capital and Team8, Orchid enables organizations to gain full visibility, consistent management, and automated, risk-based identity management across on-premise and cloud applications. Orchid's platform helps enterprises reduce costs, and maintain compliance across their digital infrastructure by continuously discovering both self-hosted and SaaS applications, assessing their native identity controls (and gaps), and remediating compliance and cyber exposure from a single point of control- without extensive effort or application recoding.

Orchid Security rakes in $36M to simplify enterprise identity security with LLMs - SiliconANGLE

Orchid Security rakes in $36M to simplify enterprise identity security with LLMs Orchid Security Inc., a cybersecurity startup that uses artificial intelligence to streamline identity security orchestration, said today it has raised $36 million in seed funding to build on its work using large language models to help enterprise businesses manage their cybersecurity posture. Orchid builds a platform that helps tackle an issue that arises in enterprise systems where numerous applications form a complex web of access points between on-premise, cloud and software-as-a-service. That can create a problem for mapping out identity and access management for which users can control what apps, when and what privileges should control what systems across the environment. The average large company can have hundreds of apps running at any time, making tracking users and their access privileges a nightmare even for the most savvy security teams. Many companies also face a rapidly evolving software environment, where information technology teams can integrate new apps, administrative privileges can change as employees are promoted or move between departments and upgrades can break what once was a consistent identity posture. Orchid said that by using an automated platform that can attend to application-centric, identity-first security, it can get ahead of potential problems and avoid manual errors by reducing costs and delays. Co-founder and Chief Executive Roy Katmor said the company went with large language model AI technology because the latest models showed increasing reasoning skills and code recognition that could assess identity flows. LLMs are the same technology that underlies AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google LLC's Gemini, which in recent months have become significantly better at reasoning over complex scenarios. "With advancements in AI and LLM technology, we can now offer a solution that automatically assesses identity capabilities and exposures -- considering target regulations, frameworks, and security best practices -- offers remediations, and helps organizations elevate and ensure consistency of their identity security posture, all while significantly reducing cost and time," said Katmor. Orchid said it starts first by building an up-to-date inventory of applications that passively continues to continuously discover self-hosted apps on the network, including SaaS and cloud apps. It then uses the LLM analytics to assess identity controls and native authentication and compares them to compliance regulations for cybersecurity frameworks and practices. Because LLMs use contextual reasoning and human-like explanations, the company said, it allows the system to describe remediations for current weaknesses in an organization's current identity posture. That includes assigning accountability to the proper parties, adding better monitoring such as upgrading protocols and more. Orchid has already signed on large customers such as Costco Wholesale Corp., Spanish multinational energy company Repsol S.A. and other Fortune 500s to secure their enterprise identity management processes. "Our objective with Orchid is to transform our largely manual process of onboarding applications -- which can take weeks after release from development -- to one that is highly automated and accomplished in just days," said Jon Raper, Costco's chief information security officer. "Orchid greatly improves our speed to delivery for business units."