I’ve known Barak Perelman , Mille Gandelsman & Ido Trivizki , Opti’s Co-Founders, for more than a decade. We first met back in 2014, when they founded their first company, Indegy , later acquired by Tenable . Even then, long before AI agents or the chaos of today’s identity landscape, it was clear they were thoughtful, capable founders who knew how to build with focus and intent. We stayed in touch all these years because we always believed that, at some point, there would be an opportunity to build something meaningful together. It just took time for the right problem to meet the right team.
When they left Tenable and began thinking about their next startup journey, they reached out to us. The relationship was strong, and they valued our perspective on early security ideas. We stayed in close touch as they continued building.
As second-time founders with a strong track record in building agent-based systems and specialized LLMs, they knew they wanted to focus on the industry’s biggest and most painful problems – the kind that justify building a standalone company for the long run and create real impact. As experienced founders, they wouldn’t settle for anything less.
Identity is the area attackers exploit most, it’s one of the most operationally painful parts of enterprise security, and it’s a mess of complexity that AI agents can actually help untangle. Not every team can build AI agents you can trust to operate in this environment. This team can.
Opti is built differently from day one. Many cybersecurity startups bolt AI on top of an existing product. At Opti’s core are AI researchers, data scientists, and engineers who’ve gained significant experience building agent-based systems deployed in complex environments. They understand the accuracy, modeling depth, and guardrails required when agents take real actions in production environments. That expertise is rare, and it’s one of their strongest differentiators. If you want AI to operate safely in identity, generic models are not enough.
As the direction became clear, it was evident they were zeroing in on a high-impact challenge in identity where the combination of depth in AI and deep understanding of cybersecurity could actually move the needle. Their approach carried the discipline and technical weight this category demands. We were closely involved in refining the early thinking, and our conviction grew quickly. Our friends at Mayfield saw the same potential and were eager to join, and together we completed the seed round – joining forces with Hetz Ventures , Squared Circle Ventures ( Karl Mattson ), Maple Capital ( Ben Tytonovich ), and LocalGlobe .
For us, this investment isn’t just about market timing or a compelling thesis. It’s about founders we’ve admired for ten years, whose judgment we trust and whose experience aligns with the hardest problems in identity today. They’re building a company with the depth, discipline, and technical quality this category demands.
Opti is exactly the kind of partnership we wait for at YL Ventures : the right founders, at the right moment, taking on the right problem.
And we’re proud to stand with them as they build it.
