There is a peculiar math problem embedded in enterprise identity management. Organizations buy the software, then spend three to five times as much getting it to actually work. Way Security wants to change that ratio, and it just raised $20 million to try, co-led by Insight Partners and Glilot Capital. Axios reported the deal first.
The Problem
Enterprise IAM programs routinely run years past schedule and into seven or eight figure cost overruns, and still ship less than they promised. Despite being one of the most widely deployed categories in cybersecurity, IAM remains heavily dependent on service providers, with implementations that are often highly bespoke and manual. Software costs represent only a fraction of total spend once implementation, customization, and ongoing operational work are factored in, and over time that has made the IAM services ecosystem larger than the software market it exists to support.
Part of the reason the problem persists is that it has become normalized. Security leaders budget for overruns because overruns are what history has taught them to expect. Consulting engagements get renewed rather than closed out. The expectation that an IAM program will take longer and cost more than planned has quietly become part of how enterprises plan for identity from the outset.
The Fix
Way Security’s AI-powered, agentic execution platform automates the operational tasks traditionally performed through costly consulting engagements. It does not replace existing IAM platforms. Instead, it removes the manual work that has historically required extensive consulting and internal engineering resources, applying identity controls uniformly across every identity type and system without custom integrations or dependence on individual application owners.
That includes legacy, homegrown, and custom applications that don’t support standard federation protocols, connecting them to the IGA, IdP, and authentication controls an organization already owns so single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, lifecycle management, and access reviews work across the full environment rather than only across the applications that were built to cooperate.
“Most IAM teams aren’t looking to replace the platforms they’ve already invested in,” said Yonatan Rosenberg, co-founder and CTO of Way Security. “They’re looking to finally get the return on investment they were promised. We built Way Security to automate the work that has traditionally stood between buying an IAM platform and actually realizing its value.”
The Money
Insight Partners and Glilot Capital co-led the $20 million investment. “Identity is one of the most critical layers of enterprise security, yet organizations still struggle to operationalize their investments efficiently,” said Jeff Horing, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Way Security is addressing a large and persistent gap between IAM software and real-world execution.” For both firms, the opportunity extends beyond the traditional IAM software market given how much more organizations spend on implementation and operations than on licensing.
The People
Way Security was founded by Yossi Barishev and Yonatan Rosenberg, former security leaders who advised Fortune 500 organizations through complex identity initiatives and led enterprise security organizations from within. Both led incident response for major cyber incidents, repeatedly seeing weak identity controls become the root cause or critical enabler of successful attacks. Rosenberg served as an officer in Israel’s Unit 8200.
“IAM is the only space in cyber where overspending and under-delivering is an acceptable reality,” said Barishev. “The more time we spent doing IAM, the more we realized how the industry normalized mediocrity and has almost given up trying to solve some of its biggest challenges.”
The Evidence
Way Security is already working with enterprise customers across multiple industries, including Fortune 500 companies, global healthcare organizations, and financial institutions, to accelerate IAM deployments and extend coverage across complex enterprise environments. Those early engagements give the company a working answer to a question investors typically ask of any execution-focused platform: whether automation can actually hold up against the scale and irregularity of real enterprise environments, rather than just the tidy examples that appear in a pitch deck.
What’s Next
The company plans to expand its U.S. presence aggressively and continue investing in its platform as identity becomes the foundation of enterprise security strategy, with the explicit goal of becoming the category leader in identity operations before competitors close the gap it has spent this round trying to widen.