Security industry veterans launch Oleria out of stealth mode with $8M seed funding

The company’s adaptive and autonomous access solution liberates businesses from traditional security bottlenecks while fueling collaboration and innovation

Founded by industry luminary and former Salesforce Chief Trust Officer (CISO) Jim Alkove, and identity solutions product executive and former JumpCloud Chief Product Officer Jagadeesh Kunda, Oleria envisions a world where organizations no longer have to choose between security and speed of innovation. By providing adaptive security solutions that enable organizations to continuously respond to their ever-changing access needs, Oleria empowers teams to freely pursue their best ideas and allow businesses to accelerate while remaining confident that sensitive data is secure.

“I’ve spent my career in some of the largest companies in the world, and have been continuously frustrated by the efforts expended to give just the right people the right access at the right time, only to be disappointed time and again,” said Jim Alkove, Oleria CEO and co-founder. “Oleria provides adaptive and autonomous security that scales with businesses and provides the freedom to pursue business objectives, while offering CISOs peace of mind that access is appropriate and risk is minimized. When businesses are secure, they are free to innovate and keep pace with our changing world.”

According to Gartner ®, “by 2026, 70% of identity-first security strategies will fail unless organizations adopt context-based access policies that are continuous and consistent.” Oleria’s founders are designing the solution to meet these demands by providing appropriate access to the right users, at the right time, for the right duration, all with a relentless focus on user experience. The platform continuously assesses and validates the people, applications and assets involved in each digital interaction and adapts to specific context and changing needs.

“Building a security solution that is not only effective but also flexible and adaptive is a challenge that will take the exceptional experience and vision of the Oleria founders to solve,” said Salesforce Ventures investor Kartik Gupta. “This team has already built industry-leading security products for businesses and consumers, and this time they are going even bigger. We are thrilled to join Oleria in its journey to redefine what the next generation of identity security means.”

Oleria’s founders have decades of experience leading security and product development at companies including Microsoft, Salesforce, AWS, Oracle and Nest. They have built and managed some of the world’s largest security solutions, used by hundreds of millions of users. Their unique vision includes disrupting the current security solutions space to enable CISOs to become liberators of business outcomes. Whether it’s CEOs and COOs approaching security as a path to innovation, CISOs and IT managers providing continuous access governance, CFOs aligning security goals to business needs, or employees striving for ambitious objectives – Oleria enables leaders to achieve the biggest and best outcomes without being held back by the constraints of traditional security approaches.

“Businesses are constantly responding to evolving threats and the currently available solutions are cumbersome, costly and ultimately constrain teams from gaining appropriate access to sensitive and relevant business data that they need to achieve critical business outcomes,” said Kevin Turner, Oleria investor and former COO of Microsoft and CIO of Walmart. “Oleria is bringing a much-needed change to cybersecurity—one that fuels collaboration and supports the pace of business while maintaining security that preserves customer trust in an ever-changing world.”

Visit ​​​​Oleria’s website and read the blog post from the founders for more information.

Gartner, Identity-First Security Maximizes Cybersecurity Effectiveness, Rebecca Archambault, Felix Gaehtgens, James Hoover, Ant Allan, 7 December 2022

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

About Oleria

For liberators of business outcomes, Oleria is the only adaptive and autonomous security solution that helps organizations accelerate at the pace of change, trusting that data is protected. Founded by cybersecurity industry veterans with several decades of experience building some of the world’s largest security solutions, Oleria allows organizations to pursue their best ideas, removing the barriers that keep team members from collaborating. Oleria sets business free. For more information, please visit www.oleria.com and follow Oleria on ​​LinkedIn and Twitter.

​​​About Salesforce Ventures

Salesforce Ventures helps enterprising founders build companies that reinvent the way the world works. Since 2009, we’ve invested in and partnered with more than 400 of the world’s most tenacious enterprise software companies from seed to IPO, including Airtable, Databricks, DocuSign, Guild Education, Hopin, monday.com, nCino, Snowflake, Snyk, Stripe, Tanium, and Zoom. Salesforce Ventures leverages our decades of expertise in the cloud and our long-term relationships with key decision makers at thousands of businesses around the world to give our portfolio companies an unfair advantage, help them build credibility, and accelerate growth. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 25 countries with offices all over the world including in San Francisco, Irvine, New York, London, Tokyo, and Sydney. Follow @SalesforceVC and learn more at https://www.salesforceventures.com.