The San Fransisco-based employee identity company Lumos is today launching from stealth mode with a banging funding north of $30M. Lumos is the first internal AppStore for organisations that purpose to replace IT tickets with a self-service portal for employees to select the apps and permissions they require.
This offering was led by Andreesen Horowitz (a16z), Google Cloud CISO Phil Venables, OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman, Neo and Lachy Groom among many more investors.
Taking up arms against the corporate SaaS apocalypse
The corporate work scene is experiencing an increasing use of multitudes of SaaS apps by employees to get work done. The result has been an improvement in productivity and collaboration, with the added convenience coming at a price. The use of these applications has resulted in massive security concerns for employees, with CISOs and IT teams constantly having to pace up with increasing points of failure.
Lumos co-founder Andrej Safundzic describes the disaster many companies are inching closer to as ‘the APPocalypse’ which he mentions will bite companies in the SaaS. Many & mismanaged IT tickets, compliance breaches and unnecessarily high SaaS license costs tell a tale of a disaster that most firms are having to deal with. Compromised employee accounts and insider threats are huge security concerns for companies.
The “AppStore for companies” circumvents this, ticketing IT support via an employee self-service portal where they can select apps and permissions needed. The result has been increased internal controls around access management while maintaining high workforce productivity. By combining SaaS management and identity governance, IT and security teams are focusing on strategic initiatives rather than dealing with operational headaches.
The key to achieving this goal is the self-service aspect. Through self-service employees increase their productivity, while ensuring security is embedded into the process. Lumos Alchemist, Andrej Safundzi further explained, “Eliminating IT tickets is possible. There’s a better, more compliant way to manage app and permission sprawl. 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, ensure security and compliance, and kill the IT ticket.”
Founded by Alan Lopez, Andrej Safundzic and Leo Mehr in 2020, Lumos has quickly grown to be the only company able to create a consumer-grade user experience for employees while enabling admins to reduce over-provisioning with automated access review and removal workflows, according to Peter Levine, a General Partner at a16z.
“As the world has shifted from “bring your own device” to “bring your own app” and now “bring your own office” the challenge of shadow IT has only continued to compound. We’re very excited to partner with the Lumos team as they build the tool that can bring light to this darkness,” added a16z’s Peter Levine, happy about his investment in Lumos.
