Apono just dropped a $34M Series B, perfectly in step with the moment. A company built on eliminating permanent privileges just secured permanent attention from every enterprise wrestling with cloud access sprawl. Led by USVP with Swisscom Ventures, Vertex Ventures, 33N Ventures and returning believers like New Era Capital Partners, Mindset Ventures, Redseed Ventures, Silvertech Ventures, Meron Capital and Booster Ventures, this round reads less like an investment and more like the market admitting the old access playbook has expired. With Jacques Benkoski joining the board, the growth curve now has seasoned acceleration behind it.
Rom Carmel and Ofir Stein built Apono in late 2021 with the kind of precision that comes from years inside Israel’s toughest cyber units. Rom’s path through the Israel PMO Cyber Division and Ofir’s years architecting high scale environments turned into a platform that treats access the way it always should have been treated: temporary, contextual and earned. Watching Apono scale from dual HQs in NYC and Tel Aviv to a global footprint has been like catching a DJ set where every transition hits sharper than the last.
The traction is the tell. 4x customer growth in a year. 300% revenue growth across 3 quarters. A customer list including Intel, HPE, Workday, Monday.com, Jasper AI and more. Enterprises are realizing that waiting hours for access approvals is a tax on innovation, and Apono cut it to 3 seconds. Pair that with a 96% reduction in standing privileges and a 94% smaller blast radius and you get a platform that prevents tomorrow’s breaches before they make headlines.
The leadership bench keeps expanding with the same momentum. Sharon Kisluk shaping product with surgical accuracy. Tamir Verthim elevating customer experience into a competitive advantage. Arik Kfir scaling R&D for the next chapter of AI driven access intelligence. Dan Parelskin pushing enterprise sales into overdrive. Stephen Lowing crafting a narrative that meets the market where it is headed instead of where it has been. This is a team that moves like it already knows the ending.
What makes this moment land even harder is how naturally Apono stepped into the future. The platform handles humans, service accounts and rising AI agents with the same discipline, exactly where access control is drifting. With this $34M round, Apono will push deeper into AI powered access intelligence, expand its US presence and sharpen its dynamic permissioning engine. In a world buried in multicloud complexity, Apono turned Zero Standing Privilege into competitive advantage, proving access done right is not a slowdown. It is acceleration the industry needed.
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