Andrej Safundzic, Alan Flores Lopez and Leo Mehr met in a class at Stanford focusing on ethics, public policy and technological change. Safundzic — speaking to TechCrunch — says that the class drove home the point that few people, particularly in the corporate sector, have control over their online identities.
“The future of software is in automating manual workflows fully end-to-end,” Safundzic said. “Authorization decisions are probably one of the first workflows that make sense for this, since they’re a very straightforward — but also highly frequent — need with real business impact.”
It’s this seed of an idea that led Safundzic, Lopez and Mehr to brainstorm ways to better manage digital corporate identities. Their efforts culminated in Lumos, a platform that helps companies manage app access permissions across on-premises and cloud environments.
Lumos, which can be accessed via a command line or the web, helps to orchestrate tasks like audits of which users have access to which apps and systems within a corporate environment. Beyond this, Lumos can estimate and recommend ways to reduce spend on software licenses by tracking usage and integrating expenses data. And — leveraging AI — Lumos can convert support tickets into workflows and analyze employee data to suggest modifications to staff access credentials.
Lumos’ tools come especially in handy for businesses with lots of apps to wrangle, Safundzic says — which surveys would suggest is most businesses. Per BetterCloud, companies were using an average of 130 apps as of 2023, up 18% from the year prior.
“Now that people are starting to invest again, our features around employee onboarding and ticket automation are gaining traction because IT leaders want to enable their workforce to achieve more,” Safundzic said. “The future of access management is IT and identity access management becoming more of a strategic function that tunes and releases AI agents that automate repetitive tasks in different areas.”
With claims of 9x revenue growth since May 2022 and a customer base that includes Roku, MongoDB and Chegg, it’s not surprising that some VCs are throwing their weight behind Lumos. This week, the startup closed a $35 million Series B tranche led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from a16z, Harpoon Ventures, Neo and others.
With a total of over $65 million in the bank, Lumos is well-positioned to head off the many, many rivals in the access and identity management identity markets, Safundzic says.
“Building a generalizable core infrastructure makes it possible to mature our products way faster than normal,” Safundzic said. “Because of that, Lumos has been able to grow faster than competitive point solutions because we serve multiple pain points for customers, which made us show up in many different requests for proposals. For any company building an end-to-end platform, you’ll have a lot of competitors due to the large product surface.”
Lumos, which is based in San Francisco, plans to grow its workforce from 95 people to ~150 by the end of the year.
