Andrej Safundzic, Alan Flores Lopez, and Leo Mehr met in classes at Stanford University, focusing on ethics, public policy, and technological change. Safundzic told TechCrunch that the class made him realize that few people, especially in the corporate sector, have control over their online identity.
“The future of software lies in fully automating manual work processes,” Safundzic said. “Authorization decisions are probably one of the first processes that make sense in this case because they are a very simple – but also very common – need that has a real impact on the business.”
It was this germ of an concept that led Safundzic, Lopez and Mehr to brainstorm ways to higher manage digital corporate identity. Their efforts have ended Drowna platform that helps companies manage application access permissions in on-premises and cloud environments.
Lumos, which may be accessed via the command line or the Internet, helps organize tasks akin to audits that determine what applications and systems in a corporate environment users have access to. Additionally, Lumos can estimate and recommend ways to scale back software license expenses by tracking usage and integrating spend data. Additionally, using artificial intelligence, Lumos can transform support tickets into workflows and analyze worker data to suggest modifications to worker credentials.
Lumos’ tools are especially useful for companies that have tons of applications to contend with, Safundzic says, and surveys show that is true for most companies. Behind On BetterCloud, businesses used an average of 130 apps in 2023, an 18% increase from the previous yr.
“Now that people are starting to invest again, our employee onboarding and ticket automation capabilities are gaining traction as IT leaders want to empower their employees to achieve more,” said Safundzic. “The future of access management is IT access and identity management, which is becoming an increasingly strategic function that tunes and enables AI agents that automate repetitive tasks across a variety of areas.”
With claims of 9x revenue growth since May 2022 and a customer base that features Roku, MongoDB, and Chegg, it is not surprising that some VCs are betting on Lumos. This week, the startup closed a $35 million Series B tranche led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from a16z, Harpoon Ventures, Neo and others.
With greater than $65 million in total in the bank, Lumos is well-positioned to beat many, many rivals in the access and identity management markets, Safundzic says.
“Building a generalizable core infrastructure allows our products to mature much faster than usual,” Safundzic said. “This allowed Lumos to grow faster than competing point solutions because we serve a lot of customer pain points, which led us to seem in many different RFPs. Any company building a comprehensive platform will have many competitors as a result of the large product footprint.
San Francisco-based Lumos plans to extend its worker count from 95 to about 150 by the end of the yr.