Defakto, a cybersecurity company specialising in non-human identity security and formerly known as SPIRL, has raised $30.75m in a Series B funding round.
The investment was led by XYZ Venture Capital, with continued backing from The General Partnership, Bloomberg Beta, and WndrCo. Other participants in the round included Michael Coates, the former CISO of Twitter, Adverb Ventures, and J.P. Morgan.
Defakto provides a comprehensive Non-Human Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform that secures automated interactions across digital environments. Its technology replaces static credentials and overprivileged service accounts with dynamic, verifiable identities for non-human actors—ranging from services, workloads, and machines to pipelines and AI agents.
The fresh funding will be used to accelerate product development, scale go-to-market operations, and strengthen the company’s position as a leading provider of non-human identity security. Defakto aims to become the industry standard for securing automated and AI-driven systems as enterprises continue to expand their reliance on digital infrastructure.
Defakto’s platform is designed to eliminate the risks associated with static secrets such as API keys and long-lived tokens, which have become a major cause of data breaches. Built on standards like SPIFFE and WIMSE, the system offers interoperability, security automation, and identity unification across cloud environments including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.
Defakto cofounder and CEO Danny Oliveri said, “Every enterprise has invested in securing its people. But non-humans are now the majority of users, and their identities are still governed by outdated, secret-based models that create mounting technical debt. We didn’t build another tool to give you more visibility or manage secrets. We built a platform to eradicate them, eliminate overprivileged access, and give enterprises the same foundation for machines and AI that IAM gave them for people.”
XYZ Venture Capital managing partner Ross Fubini said, “The shift to automation and AI makes non-human identity management unavoidable—every enterprise will need to solve this, and most are just starting to realise how deep the problem goes. Defakto has the only real answer we’ve seen. They’re not managing secrets better; they’re eliminating the need for them entirely. That’s the kind of rethinking that defines a category.”
Defakto was founded by Eli Nesterov and Danny Oliveri. Nesterov, who led one of the world’s largest SPIFFE deployments, brings extensive expertise in modern identity infrastructure, while Oliveri contributes decades of experience launching enterprise-grade security products. The company’s platform is already used by Global 2000 firms to manage non-human identities at scale.
Defakto CTO and cofounder Eli Nesterov said, “Enterprises today can’t enter the age of AI on a foundation of static secrets and overprivileged access. Defakto replaces that legacy model with dynamic identity, transforming security from a liability into an enabler. This is the future of infrastructure: autonomous, inherently secure, governable, and limitless in scale.”
The General Partnership cofounder Daniel Portillo said, “Defakto is tackling one of the hardest problems in enterprise security—managing non-human identity at scale. With the growth of AI in enterprise, the problem will only get more complex. Watching Danny, Eli, and the team turn that vision into enterprise infrastructure that companies can depend on has been impressive, and we’ve been fortunate to build alongside them as they defined this new category.”
Bloomberg Beta partner James Cham added, “What makes Defakto’s work groundbreaking is that it doesn’t just solve today’s problems, it creates the foundation for enterprises to embrace automation and AI with confidence for decades to come because of their record of success with some of the biggest, most demanding customers in the world.”
Copyright © 2025 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
