U.K. cybersecurity startup Join Ploy Ltd. revealed today that it has raised £2.5 million ($3.33 million) to accelerate product development and expand its go-to-market efforts globally.

Founded in 2023 by Chief Technology Officer Harry Lucas and Chief Executive Officer Jacob Prime, the former heads of engineering and sales at data security solution company Metomic Ltd., Ploy is tackling the rise in identity-related cyberattacks. They now account for 80% of breaches and overwhelm organizations due to complex identity management across distributed software-as-a-service and cloud environments.

The company addresses the issue where legacy identity governance and administration tools often take years to implement and were designed for on-premises environments that no longer reflect how modern companies operate. Ploy argues that with the majority of businesses now running distributed technology stacks across hundreds of SaaS applications, these outdated approaches leave security teams blind to identity risks and drowning in manual processes.

Ploy addresses the issue of legacy IGA tools by making access secure and compliant through automation for identity processes, from onboarding and offboarding to access requests and reviews, across SaaS, cloud and collaboration tools. The platform comes with prebuilt integrations and automated workflows that let companies see every access grant and start automating identity processes in under 20 minutes.

The platform also includes an embedded artificial intelligence assistant called “Luna” that gives security teams the intelligence to spot anomalies and make context-rich access decisions.

Although relatively young, Ploy has secured more than 1 million individual access entitlements and discovered more than 26,000 SaaS applications that use companies’ identities across its customer base.

Ploy’s growing customer base includes Payfit SAS, Not On The High Street Ltd., Welcome to the Jungle SAS, ComplyAdvantage Ltd., Liberis Capital Ltd. and Times Higher Education Ltd.

“With 80% of breaches now stemming from identity, boards are realizing it’s the biggest area they need to prioritize in their security strategy,” said co-founder and CEO Jacob Prime. “Spreadsheet-based access tracking is now a legal and security liability. They need real-time visibility into who has access to what before attackers or regulators find the gaps. That’s exactly the problem Ploy solves.”

The round was led by Osney Capital, with participation from Superseed, Tiny.vc, Rule30 Ventures and a number of individual investors.

Image: Ploy