Subbu Rama, a serial entrepreneur in Austin who previously founded AI infrastructure company Bitfusion, has a new startup called BalkanID Inc.
The company came out of stealth May 12 with $5.75 million in seed funding from backers across the country, including Uncommon Capital, Afore Capital, Sure Ventures and several tech executives, including Austin residents Pat Condon, co-founder of Rackspace, and Vivek Sodera, co-founder of email platform Superhuman.
Rama co-founded the startup last fall with former Bitfusion engineering leader Jeremy Patton and Sameer Sait, a former chief information security officer at Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market who was also CISO at Austin-based ForcePoint.
BalkanID uses AI to give security officers at small- and medium-sized businesses a more streamlined and prioritized way to manage who has access and credentials to access software programs, subscription services and other programs.
The identity governance startup is, in a sense, similar to one of Austin's recent success stories, SailPoint Technologies Holdings, Inc., which was founded in 2005 and went public in 2017 and currently has a market cap of about $5 billion and is being acquired by Thoma Bravo for $6.1 billion.
Rama noted SailPoint isn't a direct competitor, given it targets its services toward larger companies than BalkanID. And he prefers to draw an analogy to electric carmaker Tesla, instead. That company, he said, brought a new way of thinking to electric cars, equipping them with auto-pilot and making at least the lower end models affordable for the mass market.
"We kind of actually want to be the Tesla of IGA. The vision is that we want to put this whole IG on autopilot," he said. "We are in baby steps as a startup, obviously. We are not going to get there immediately. But in the next few years, if we become really, really successful, that's what I see. My mission is kind of building this company as a company that we can be with for the next two decades."
Rama said the idea of creating an access management company started while he was working as chief technology officer at payroll and tax technology company Certino, where he worked following VMware's acquisition of Bitfusion.
"I was kind of actually also acting as a security head as well. We didn't have any CISOs. So, I saw a lot of challenges. How do we secure the data? How do we put governance around it? How do we secure applications? How do we basically show proof to auditors and compliance? And one of the things I noticed was there's really nothing for the mid market and smaller companies."
He and his co-founders reached out to 200-plus CISOs at businesses around the country to help identify their pain points.
With their background in AI infrastructure, the co-founders and their team developed an AI risk engine that automatically points out risky users who may have far more permissions and passwords to software subscriptions than necessary. Many small- to mid-sized businesses manage such credentials and access on expansive spreadsheets where it may be easy to overlook compliance hazards and security risks.
At an evening meeting at Capital Factory, the co-founders and early team members named the company BalkanID because one of a co-founder's wife is from the Balkans region and the splintered nature and disruptive history of the area. The team saw parallels to the identity governance space.
"There are a lot of application owners and everything is like really in a disarray, especially in the mid market and smaller companies," he said. "...so we said just like how you need a governance body around the Balkan region, which is always under a lot of conflict, we saw a parallel and said, "OK, let's call it BulkanID. Plus, you know, we didn't have a lot of options for names. Most of the names are already taken, and we didn't want to pay a lot of money."
BalkanID currently has around 20 employees, mostly engineers. It was born during the pandemic, and it doesn't have an office.
"I would rather take the real estate money that you're going to spend on an office and give it back to the team members and say let's actually do an off site where the team members get something. Maybe if we become really successful in a year or two, if it warrants, maybe we'll have an office or maybe we'll have one of these coworking spaces. It's too early, to be fully transparent."
