Before Way Security existed, Yossi Barishev and Yonatan Rosenberg spent years watching the same problem play out inside some of the world’s largest enterprises. Identity programs got funded generously and delivered poorly. Now the company they built to fix that has raised $20 million, co-led by Insight Partners and Glilot Capital, a deal Axios reported first.
Two Careers That Led to One Company
Barishev and Rosenberg are both former security leaders who spent years helping large enterprises navigate identity, governance, and security challenges. They advised Fortune 500 organizations through some of their most complex identity initiatives and led enterprise security organizations from within, giving them firsthand insight into why IAM programs stall despite significant technology investment.
The pair also spent years leading incident response efforts for organizations facing some of the world’s most significant cyber incidents, repeatedly seeing how weak identity controls became the root cause or critical enabler of successful attacks. Rosenberg additionally served as an officer in Israel’s elite Unit 8200, adding an offensive security perspective to the team’s operational and defensive expertise. That combination, forged across years of advisory work, internal leadership, and crisis response, is what eventually pushed the two toward building something of their own rather than continuing to advise from the outside.
The Idea Takes Shape
That combination of experience shaped Way Security’s vision for making IAM finally work the way enterprises expect it to. “IAM is the only space in cyber where overspending and under-delivering is an acceptable reality,” said Barishev, co-founder and CEO of Way Security. “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.”
Backing From Insight Partners and Glilot Capital
According to Axios’s reporting, investors saw in Barishev and Rosenberg a combination that is rare to find together. “As investors, we’re constantly looking for the rare combination of an exceptional team, a massive market opportunity, and a differentiated approach,” said Nofar Amikam, Managing Partner at Glilot Capital. “With Yossi and Yonatan, all three were evident from our very first meeting. They possess a deep understanding of the identity challenges facing large enterprises because they’ve lived them firsthand, and they’ve built a fundamentally better way to solve them. Identity has become the foundation of modern security, and we believe this team has the vision, talent, and determination to build the company that will define how the next generation of enterprises manages and secures it.”
The Technology
Way Security’s AI-powered agentic platform automates the operational tasks required for identity teams to fully deploy, manage, and maintain their existing IAM investments, rather than requiring organizations to replace or replatform their systems. It applies identity controls uniformly across every identity type and system without custom integrations, manual workflows, or ongoing dependence on application owners.
That coverage reaches applications that standard IAM tooling typically cannot, including legacy, homegrown, and custom systems that do not support standard federation protocols. Way Security connects these applications to the IGA, IdP, and authentication controls an organization already owns, extending single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, lifecycle management, and access reviews across the full environment.
“The issue isn’t that enterprises lack the right tools,” said Barishev. “It’s that those tools are incredibly expensive and complex to operationalize. We built Way Security to remove that friction.”
Customers Signing On
The company is already working with enterprise customers across multiple industries, including Fortune 500 companies, global healthcare organizations, and financial institutions, to accelerate IAM deployments and eliminate manual implementation work.
Ambitions for the U.S. Market
Way Security plans to aggressively expand its U.S. presence as organizations increasingly prioritize identity as the foundation of modern cybersecurity. “We’re at a pivotal moment in the market,” said Rosenberg, co-founder and CTO. “Our priority now is to move quickly, expand our platform, grow our presence in the U.S., and establish Way Security as the category leader in identity operations before the market catches up.”
