Andrej Safuncic, Alan Flores López, and Leo Mare met at Stanford University in a class on ethics, public policy, and innovation. Safunzik told TechCrunch that his class drove home the point that very few people, especially in the corporate sector, have control over their online identities.
“The future of software is in fully automating manual workflows, end to end,” Safuncic says. “Approval decisions are probably one of the first workflows that lend themselves to this, because they're a very simple, yet very frequent need that has a real business impact.”
This seed of an idea led Safunzik, Lopez, and Mair to brainstorm ways to better manage digital corporate identities. Their efforts culminated in Lumos, a platform that helps enterprises manage app permissions across on-premises and cloud environments.
Accessible via the command line or the web, Lumos helps orchestrate tasks such as auditing which users have access to which apps and systems within a corporate environment. Additionally, by tracking usage and integrating expense data, Lumos can estimate and recommend ways to reduce software license spending. You can also leverage AI to turn support tickets into workflows and analyze employee data to recommend changes to staff access credentials.
Safunzik said Lumos' tools are especially useful for businesses that have a large number of apps to manage. Research shows that this is the case for most companies. According to BetterCloud, businesses will be using an average of 130 apps in 2023, an 18% increase from the previous year.
“Now that people are starting to invest again, IT leaders want to enable their employees to accomplish more, so our capabilities around employee onboarding and ticket automation are gaining traction. ''Safundjić said. “The future of access management is for IT and identity access management to become strategic capabilities that coordinate and release AI agents that automate repetitive tasks across a variety of areas.”
With expected 9x revenue growth since May 2022 and a customer base that includes Roku, MongoDB, and Chegg, it's no wonder some VCs are backing Lumos. This week, the startup closed on a $35 million Series B tranche led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from a16z, Harpoon Ventures, Neo and others.
With more than $65 million in total funding, Lumos is well-positioned to stay ahead of many competitors in the access and identity management identity market, Safundzic said.
“Building a generalizable core infrastructure allows us to mature our product much faster than we would normally,” Safundzic said. “That's allowed Lumos to grow faster than competitor point solutions because we're addressing multiple pain points for our customers and therefore can respond to a variety of requests for proposals. For companies that are building end-to-end platforms, you have a lot of competitors because your product surface area is large.”
San Francisco-based Lumos plans to grow its workforce from 95 to about 150 by the end of the year.