AI-Native Platform Targets Identity Governance Gaps and Automation
An identity security and governance startup led by a former Via executive raised $50 million to process relationships between identities, permissions and resources in real-time.
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The Insight Partners-led Series B funding round will allow New York-based Linx Security to take a holistic approach to identity that spans visibility, risk analysis and remediation, said co-founder and CEO Israel Duanis. He said Linx will evolve alongside the identity landscape, incorporating new identity types such as artificial intelligence agents while maintaining a unified model.
“We have security, we have the signals from the market, and we have the fact that today, just like Wiz did to cloud slavery data, we can do to identity because the architecture enables it,” Duanis told ISMG.
Linx Security, founded in 2023, employs 83 people and has raised $83 million, having last completed a $27 million Series A funding round in July 2024 led by Index Ventures and Cyberstarts. The company has been led since inception by Duanis, who was previously the head of autonomous vehicles at Via, the CEO of fleet management platform Fleetonomy, and Check Point Software’s head of threat prevention.
How Linx Differs From Traditional Identity Governance Tools
Identity has always been the most reliable entry point for attackers, and despite advances in security tooling, Duanis said that has not changed. What has changed, however, is the scale and complexity of identity-related risk. The proliferation of SaaS applications, service accounts and machine identities has created a landscape in which traditional identity governance approaches struggle to keep pace, he said.
“You cannot fight AI without having AI,” Duanis said. “And what does that mean? You need to be quick. You need to be proactive. You need to predict if an attack is going to happen, and you need to identify a policy drift on the first second it happens.”
While AI agents bring clear productivity benefits, they also introduce a new class of threats since they can operate continuously, escalate privileges quickly and interact with multiple systems simultaneously. This creates a dual challenge for organizations, which Duanis must enable innovation while simultaneously mitigating risks introduced by nonhuman identities acting independently.
“Most CSOs we talk to have a gap in answering who has access to what right – a human, a non-human, an agent,” Duanis said. “And not who had access to that last quarter, who had access to that last week, like we’ve all been used to when it comes to identity. But right now, in this second, especially in an era in which things happen like in milliseconds, who has access to what?”
Traditional identity governance and administration platforms were built decades ago with architectures that can’t support real-time analysis or automation, Duanis said. Legacy systems often rely on periodic reviews and static policies, which are too slow for today’s environments where access changes occur in milliseconds. This architectural gap creates blind spots that attackers can exploit, according to Duanis.
“We are continuing to double down,” Duanis said. “The fact that we see identity as probably the top priority for CISOs today means we need to put the money to play on continuing to get more and more layers of the platform.”
Why Linx Focuses On Enabling Action, Not Surfacing Risks
Simply surfacing risks shifts responsibility back to already overburdened security teams, and Duanis said the focus should instead be on enabling action. Duanis said Linx’s approach includes identifying risks such as dormant accounts, excessive privileges and policy violations, then providing mechanisms to remediate them quickly. This shift from passive insight to active enforcement is a broad trend, he said.
“If I only show you the risk, I’m basically just moving the liability to you,” Duanis said. “Therefore, Linx is also all about taking action.”
Traditional identity governance processes are described as slow and labor-intensive, with tasks such as access reviews, onboarding and offboarding often taking weeks or months and being prone to errors. Automation addresses these gaps by boosting processes and reducing reliance on manual intervention, which is not just about efficiency but also about closing security gaps that arise from human limitations.
“The beauty about this platform, you can decide if you want to go fully automated, manually or only partially automated,” Duanis said.
Extracting insights from identity systems historically required technical expertise or external consultants, but Duanis said Linx replaced this with natural language interfaces, allowing users to ask complex questions in plain English and receive immediate answers along with audit-ready documentation. This significantly lowers the barrier to accessing and acting on identity data, according to Duanis.
“With the technology today, you don’t need to learn a query language, you don’t need to call professional services,” Duanis said. “When you use Linx, you just put in free text.”