Defakto, a cybersecurity company specialising in non-human identity protection, has raised $30.75m in a Series B funding round led by XYZ Venture Capital.
The round also saw continued participation from The General Partnership, Bloomberg Beta, WndrCo, Adverb Ventures, and J.P. Morgan, as well as industry veteran Michael Coates, the former CISO of Twitter.
Based in the United States, Defakto — formerly known as SPIRL — is pioneering a new approach to securing non-human identities, including services, workloads, machines, pipelines, and AI agents. The company has launched the first complete Non-Human Identity and Access Management (IAM) platform, designed to replace static credentials and overprivileged service accounts with dynamic, verifiable identities across enterprise environments.
The new capital will be used to accelerate Defakto’s product development, expand its go-to-market operations, and strengthen its position as a leader in non-human identity security. The company aims to establish itself as the industry standard for securing automated systems and AI-driven infrastructures.
In modern enterprises, non-human identities vastly outnumber human users, yet many organisations still rely on outdated security practices such as static API keys, long-lived tokens, and vault-stored secrets. This creates what Defakto describes as “vault sprawl” and “service account bloat,” leaving businesses vulnerable to breaches and unauthorised access. Defakto’s platform addresses this by unifying identity management across AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments, while eliminating static secrets entirely.
Defakto was co-founded by Eli Nesterov and Danny Oliveri. Nesterov previously led one of the largest SPIFFE deployments globally, gaining firsthand insight into the limitations of legacy IAM systems, while Oliveri brings decades of experience in building enterprise security products. The company already serves several Global 2000 enterprises, securing their non-human identities at scale.
Defakto 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 But non-humans are now the majority of users, and their identities are still governed by outdated, secret-based models that create mounting technical debt.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 realize 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 CTO 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 said, “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.”
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