Category Creation: Reflecting on Entro Security

When we led our investment in Entro Security a couple of years ago, we were making two bets: that non-human identity was a real and growing pain for enterprise and that we'd found the most authentic team to solve that problem. Thanks to a confluence of innovation, market need (hello, agentic everything!), and this team's experience, both of those bets have paid off.

As venture investors, a solid acquisition is of course a win. But it's also just one moment in time. There are many other moments that take place to get a team there. With SailPoint announcing its intention to acquire Entro Security, it seemed a perfect time to reflect on a few of those moments for the Entro team.

Moment One: What Came Before
‍Before Entro, Itzik Alvas and Adam Cheriki were security practitioners living the non-human identity (NHI) challenge. Itzik came from a senior security roles at Microsoft and Maccabi Health, the second-largest managed healthcare systemin Israel. Adam from security positions across IBM, Symantec, and Broadcom. Cloud service and hybrid systems, DevOps automations, and IoT devices had led to an explosion authentication and authorization transactions between machines. They saw service accounts, API keys, and tokens proliferating without governance and recognized an enterprise-scale risk that was only going to get worse. The problem didn't yet have a name but no matter. In 2022, they decided it was big enough to warrant its own focused solution so they left their respective roles and started Entro Security.

Moment Two: From Stealth to Category Creation
‍A year after founding the company, Itzik and Adam brought the team out of stealth with their "Non-human Identity" security solution. What they had built reflected their practitioner instinct. Rather than point-in-time scanning, the platform offered end-to-end visibility across the full NHI lifecycle — real-time anomaly detection, ownership attribution, and lineage mapping that surfaced over-privileged access before it became a breach.

The rub? Despite the clear need, there was no influential Magic Quadrant or Wave for their solution. So along with strong marketing leadership of CMO Nirit Icekson, they set out to create the category. Three short months later, the market acknowledged Entro was on to something when Gartner named them a Cool Vendor in the Identity-First category just three months after public launch. They then went on to create an early NHI community with the NHAI Global Summit, the first-ever conference dedicated to Non-Human Identity and AI Agent Security. The result? Accolades -- Global InfoSec and CRN awards, analyst recognition --piled up and Fortune 1000 customers signed on.

Moment Three: Bring on the Agents
Then the AI agent boom arrived and made everything Entro had built even more relevant overnight. As agentic AI took hold across the enterprise, the number of non-human identities consuming secrets and acting autonomously exploded. Entro's own research had already shown NHIs outnumbering humans 144 to 1, and AI agents were accelerating that curve fast. The team responded the way good practitioners do: they extended the platform. In 2025, Entro launched a dedicated AI agent discovery and governance solution, giving security teams visibility into what their agents were doing, what credentials they were using, and where the risks were. A natural extension of everything they'd already built, and it arrived at exactly the right moment.

Moment Four: Joining SailPoint
Categories are created by people who understand a problem deeply and keepbuilding before the market fully catches up. Itzik, Adam, the Entro Labs team,and everyone who built alongside them did exactly that, catching the attention SailPoint,the market leader in identity governance. That's a strong signal for this teamand for the category they helped create. We're proud to have backed them early,and we look forward to this next chapter getting their foresight and work infront of an even bigger audience.

Well-earned and well-deserved outcome, Entro!

-- Deepak Jeevankumar, Barrel Kfir, & Team DTC

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