Venice just walked out of stealth with $33M in total funding and a message that hits like a well-timed cymbal crash. Privileged access in the AI era cannot run on yesterday’s passwords and polite approval chains. It needs teeth. It needs timing. It needs control that shows up exactly when it should and disappears before trouble clocks in.
Congratulations to Rotem Lurie, Co-founder and CEO, and Or Vaknin, Co-founder and CTO, on locking in a $25M Series A led by IVP, with Index Ventures, Vine Ventures, and Holly Ventures in the mix. Cack Wilhelm of IVP did not lean in for nostalgia. He leaned in because the ground is shifting under enterprise identity, and Venice is standing where the fault line meets opportunity.
Venice, formerly Valkyrie, was founded in 2024 and operates out of Tel Aviv and New York. The company is building an adaptive privileged access platform designed for a world where humans, machines, and AI agents all want the keys to the kingdom. Traditional vault based PAM assumed the castle had walls and a moat. Now the castle is in the cloud, the moat is SaaS, and the drawbridge is an API call at 3 in the morning.
Venice eliminates standing privilege by default. Access is granted when it is needed and removed when it is not. Real-time control across cloud, SaaS, on-prem, and AI-driven environments. Agentless. Proxy free. Built to discover every identity and entitlement across hybrid sprawl without sending your team into deployment purgatory. The company reports reducing standing privileges by 99% for customers, including Fortune 500 enterprises. That number should make every CISO pause mid sip.
The subtext is bigger than the headline. 86% of breaches involve stolen or compromised credentials. Enterprises are juggling tens of thousands of identities, human and otherwise. The old model assumed people were the problem. The new reality is that code writes code, bots trigger workflows, and AI agents move faster than any audit committee. If access lingers, risk compounds.
Venice is not selling fear. It is selling precision. The right entity, the right resource, the right moment. Then gone. For enterprises in finance, media, hospitality, manufacturing, healthcare, and technology, that is not a feature. That is survival math.
Rotem Lurie and Or Vaknin are not new to the game. Cyber intelligence veterans who have seen identity sprawl from the inside, they are betting that zero standing privilege becomes the baseline, not the bonus round. $33M says the market agrees.
The real question is not whether enterprises need better privileged access management. It is whether they are ready to admit that in an AI-driven world, access is no longer a static permission. It is a living, breathing risk surface that either adapts in real time or learns the hard way.
