Startup Lumos App Inc., which helps companies manage the software-as-a-service applications used by their employees, today launched from stealth mode with more than $30 million in initial funding.

Lumos raised the capital from a group of investors that included Andreessen Horowitz. Prominent technology investor Lachy Groom, OpenAI LLC Chief Technology Officer Greg Brockman and Phil Venables, chief information security officer of Google Cloud, also participated in the round.

Information technology teams implement cybersecurity rules to regulate how their companies’ cloud applications are accessed by workers. That prevents unauthorized users from gaining access to sensitive business data. In a large company with thousands of workers who use hundreds of cloud services, managing which user may interact with what service can be a time-consuming task.

San Francisco-based Lumos has developed a platform that promises to help IT teams manage application usage with less effort. The platform allows employees to request access to an application through a self-service interface. From there, Lumos routes each request to the relevant member of the IT team for approval, which the startup says reduces the application onboarding process to a few minutes.

“There’s a better, more compliant way to manage app and permission sprawl,” said Lumos co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Andrej Safundzic. “It crucially involves structured self-service. By enhancing role-based access control (RBAC) with a self-service portal (with roles, rules and workflows), IT, IAM and security teams can automate the on and offboarding process.”

Lumos also promises to simplify several related tasks for IT teams.

In some cases, workers require access to an application only for a limited amount of time. An administrator helping to deploy a new cloud service for the marketing department may require the ability to log into the service only until the setup process is complete. For such situations, Lumos provides a tool that enables companies to assign temporary access permissions to users. The temporary permissions automatically expire within a predefined time frame. 

Lumos tracks which users have access to what applications in a centralized dashboard. According to the startup, administrators can consult the dashboard to find unused software-as-a-service subscriptions and reduce costs. Lumos also makes it possible to detect cloud applications that were provisioned without the IT department’s approval, which can potentially lead to cybersecurity risks if left unaddressed.

Lumos’ customer base includes enterprise technology firms such as venture-backed file storage company Nasuni Corp. and Druva Inc., a data protection provider that received a $2 billion valuation last year. The startup has also a presence in a number of other markets. 

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