Descope: Masterclass in Skating ahead of the Puck

Descope’s announcement that they’ve closed a total of $88million for their seed round highlights the company’s momentum and the progress already made. I thought this would be an opportune moment to share why we committed early.

A Team with a Track Record

We invest in founders that are highly technical subject matter experts who can also demonstrate clear empathy for the customers they’rebuilding for. Co-founders Slavik Markovich, Rishi Bhargava, Dan Sarel, GuyRinat, Meir Wahnon, Doron Sharon, Aviad Lichtenstadt, and Gilad Shriki (yes,eight co-founders) brought those attributes to the table with Descope. But they also had a proven track record. Before starting Descope, these eight gentlemen were the four co-founders and first four employees of Demisto, building and eventually selling the security orchestration leader to Palo Alto Networks for$560M.

Not content with that significant win, they were back at itwith Descope. In 2022, when they founded the company, they were looking to solve an interesting auth security problem. But today, in 2025, in an increasingly agentic world, that “interesting” problem is now a critical challenge for the enterprise.

Meeting the Needs of Modern Identity

The identity landscape is undergoing a major transformation.Traditional password-based authentication—long recognized as a leading cause of security breaches—no longer meets the requirements of modern users and organizations. The Descope team recognized this early, building on their own experiences and listening to the pain points faced by both enterprises andindividual developers.

What makes the timing so relevant is the rapid emergence of agentic AI and MCP (Model Context Protocol) technologies. Applications are accessed by users but are also now navigated by AI agents and automated systems. This shift introduces new complexities in securing access and preserving trust. Descope is at the forefront of this evolution, enabling organizations to securely adopt agentic AI and MCP servers with identity guardrails baked-in. Their recently launched Agentic Identity Hub enables developers to “descope” authentication, access control, and identity management workinvolved in taking agentic AI systems to production. This positions Descope as the identity provider of choice for humans as well as AI agents.

And the Needs of Developers

‍Just as important is Descope’s focus on the developer experience. Building customer identity processes is traditionally time-consuming and difficult, requiring both flexibility and enterprise-grade security. Drawing from lessons learned at Demisto, Descope enables teams to create secure, customizable user journeys through intuitive visual workflows known as Descope Flows. This approach empowers developers to get to market fast, adapt to changing requirements, and scale authentication capabilities as their needs evolve—whether they’re supporting B2C, B2B, agentic, or increasingly hybrid models.

Descope’s commitment to thorough, developer-centric documentation and technical content ensures ease of adoption and true self-serve onboarding. As developer tools and frameworks change rapidly,Descope stays ahead by meeting teams where they are going to be and supporting integration into any stack.

With this expanded round, Descope is well positioned to accelerate its R&D efforts, expand the team, and further its mission to redefine identity for both people and intelligent agents—making secure, modern authentication available to every organization.

Growth and Industry Validation

‍Since launching from stealth in early 2023, Descope has rapidly evolved from a tool for developers to a full external IAM platform serving over a thousand organizations and managing hundreds of millions of identities. The recent addition of an advisory board with leaders from GoFundMe, Databricks, and MongoDB highlights trust and validation in their direction.

Identity stands as a core layer of the internet. And we believe Agentic Identity will be a core layer of Agentic Internet of the future. Descope’s platform is designed to make modern identity management (for both humans and agents) accessible and reliable. We’re happy to support -- with strong conviction -- the team having a repeat journey to success with Descope.

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