In 2024, a breach of a machine token in BeyondTrust’s Remote Support SaaS platform led to a major incident involving U.S. Department of the Treasury systems. Attackers used a static credential to gain privileged access, bypassing controls meant for human users. The incident revealed a broader issue: non-human identities now outnumber human users by a factor of 50, yet remain the most vulnerable in enterprise systems. Riptides, a startup focused on machine-to-machine trust, is tackling this challenge head-on.
The company replaces manually managed API keys, tokens, and passwords with cryptographically verifiable identities that are automatically created and rotated. These identities enable agents and workloads to authenticate one another, encrypt connections, and manage access without relying on static secrets.
Today, Riptides announced $3.3 million in pre-seed funding to launch its platform for managing secure non-human identities. This represents one of the largest pre-seed funding rounds in Central and Eastern Europe and Hungary’s largest to date. The round, led by PortfoLion Capital and Kaya VC, will support product development, security research, and initial design partnerships.
The founding team’s fund, Cloudbreak, is contributing $500,000, alongside several Hungarian and international angel investors. This record-breaking pre-seed round not only validates Riptides’ vision but also highlights Hungary’s emergence as a hub for deep-tech innovation and the CEE region’s growing reputation for world-class cybersecurity talent.
How Riptides transforms machine identity security
Riptides is actively engaging with enterprises and AI-first companies looking to move away from legacy secrets management. The company aims to address the growing complexity and security risks of managing secrets and non-human identities in modern cloud-native and AI-driven infrastructures.
The founding team brings deep expertise in cloud-native and enterprise security, with a proven track record of successful exits. CEO Márton Sereg and Head of R&D János Mátyás previously co-founded Banzai Cloud, which was acquired by Cisco, and Sequenceiq, which Hortonworks acquired. CTO Zsolt Varga, an early Banzai Cloud hire, became a key team member and later led engineering for Cisco’s agentic AI infrastructure product. CISO Nándor Krácser brings over 15 years of experience building secure infrastructure at Cisco and IBM, as well as startup experience as a core employee at Ustream, which IBM acquired.
“When we learned that Márton, Zsolt, Nándor, and János were leaving Cisco to build something new, we immediately knew they were the team we wanted to partner with again after our joint success at Banzai Cloud. Companies spend billions of dollars annually on identity and access management solutions. Yet, these solutions often lack proper functionality to manage thousands of non-human identities that are frequently over-privileged and overlooked. We are excited to back the Riptides team as they build the new standard in NHI management for the age of agentic workflows. In this era, non-human interactions are set to explode,” Daniel Kiss-Kiraly, VC at PortfoLion Capital Partners, commented.
The platform unifies and secures secrets across entire technology stacks, replacing static secrets with real, short-lived, non-human identities. It automates credential issuance and rotation, shifts access control from the network layer to the workload and kernel level, and enables secure, auditable identity management for workloads and AI agents. The core goal is to eliminate human error from secret management, reduce credential sprawl, and build a more secure, identity-first infrastructure for modern applications and AI systems.
Securing workload-to-workload communication in modern cloud-native
Securing workload-to-workload communication in modern cloud-native environments requires a fundamental shift from human-centric to machine-first security. Riptides is built around “identity as its foundation,” replacing static secrets with dynamic, cryptographically strong, short-lived identities for workloads and AI agents. The platform automates credential issuance and rotation, ensuring secure and efficient management of non-human identities without manual intervention.
“Non-human identities now outnumber human logins by orders of magnitude, yet they remain the weakest link in cloud and AI stacks. Riptides hard‑wires into the kernel, giving enterprises a tamper‑proof, zero‑friction way to secure every service‑to‑service call. We’re excited to back Márton, Zsolt and the Budapest team as they build the non-human identity layer of the modern internet,” Karel Zheng, investor at KAYA VC, said.
Instead of relying solely on network-based security (such as firewalls or VPNs), Riptides enforces access control at the workload and kernel level. The platform is purpose-built for cloud-native, multi-cloud, and AI-powered environments, where traditional secret management tools struggle to scale and cope with the dynamism of ephemeral workloads.
“By adopting unified, cryptographic identities for workloads and agents, we can secure communications across AI agents, data center services, and third-party integrations in a consistent, and transparent way. This approach paves the way for true zero-trust connectivity at scale. Riptides is building the infrastructure that makes this possible. Because in a world where machines talk to machines, identity is everything,” says Márton Sereg, co-founder and CEO of Riptides.
As CEE’s startup ecosystem matures, Riptides demonstrates how regional technical expertise combined with global investor confidence can yield solutions that redefine industry standards. With machine identities projected to grow 30% annually, Riptides is well-positioned to lead the transition to a zero-trust future where every interaction, human or machine, is authenticated by design.
