Orchid Security, a New York startup building technology in the identity-first security orchestration space, has raised $36 million in an unusually large seed round co-led by Team8 and Intel Capital.

The company and its investors are making a big bet on using LLMs (large language models) to address the complexity of managing fragmented identity systems in large enterprises.

Orchid Security has ambitious plans to build a platform to simplify identity and access management (IAM) for enterprises that struggle with a  fragmented ecosystem of more than  1,200 applications hosted on-premise, in the cloud, or delivered as SaaS. 

Orchid Security said its platform will automatically discover applications and evaluate authentication and authorization flows to pinpoint weak spots and suggest areas for remediation.

Using artificial intelligence, the technology promises to eliminate the need for manual code access or application owner input, allowing faster onboarding and reduced professional services costs. 

“LLMs play a pivotal role in this innovative technology by providing essential identity-related context and reasoning. This empowers the solution to evaluate an application’s inherent identity flows and validate the coherence of those assessments, all without requiring access to or changes in the application code,” the company said in a note announcing the capital raise.

““The latest LLM models include code recognition and reasoning skills that enable understanding of identity flows in running applications without requiring code access or input from the application owners. When prompted correctly, these models go beyond data processing —they comprehend context, make inferences, and deliver accurate decisions,” Orchid Security added.

Orchid Security said it has already partnered with Fortune 500 companies like Costco and Repsol to deliver improvements in identity security management.

Orchid Security is the brainchild of the team behind enSilo, a company that was acquired by Fortinet in 2019.

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