Why I invested in Aembit

By Mark Kraynak

When I first started working with what’s now the Acrew team, one of the areas I thought was the most interesting was what I then called “Machine Identity.” (side note, I still like this term better than Non Human Identity, not so much because of accuracy, I just think it sounds way more cool).

Anyhow, I looked at a bunch of companies and made no investments in that space because most of them had deployment models that were way too intrusive or difficult — either agents everywhere or rewriting core parts of already scaled applications. I don’t want to call anyone out, but the lack of progress in that space since seems to validate that choice.

Since, the problem of NHI has exploded…cloud native architectures have changed that game by dramatically increasing the bulk of identities used by non humans. So it’s even more important an issue than it was back then.

A new crop of NHI companies has been formed in the last 12 months. Most of them are trying to help their customers identify problems with their existing identity posture for NHI and then hopefully help them fix those problems. The issue with this is that the existing infrastructure wasn’t built for this scale of problem so optimizing it is, in my opinion, doomed to fail.

Along came David Goldschlag and Kevin Sapp and what Aembit does is solve the issue in a scalable way that can be deployed seamlessly into brownfield environments. (You can also directly integrate into your code if you’re building a new application). I really think they have the two components needed to make an impact on this problem (scalability and deployability).