Oded Hareven

Co-Founder & CEO Akeyless Security

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Oded Hareven co-founded Akeyless with Shai Onn and Refael Angel out of the Team8 venture foundry and runs it as chief executive. The company’s founding bet was architectural and contrarian: that enterprises should not be running their own secrets vaults. Credentials, keys and certificates proliferate across multi-cloud environments faster than any self-hosted vault can be maintained, and the vault itself becomes a high-value target and an operational burden. Akeyless built a vaultless, zero-knowledge, SaaS-delivered alternative in which the provider never holds a customer’s keys in usable form. That premise has scaled into what the company now calls a unified secrets and machine identity platform, securing by its own account more than 220 billion machine identity interactions. Since 2025 Hareven has driven the company hard at the next version of the same problem — AI agents, which authenticate like machines but act with discretion — shipping SecretlessAI to keep credentials out of agents altogether and then Agentic Runtime Authority to govern what an agent is allowed to do after it has been let in.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Akeyless with Shai Onn, now co-founder and president, and Refael Angel, co-founder and CTO; chief executive throughout.
• Raised a $14 million Series A, then a $65 million Series B in November 2022 led by NGP Capital with Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners, taking disclosed funding to $80 million.
• Took a strategic investment from Deutsche Bank’s corporate venture capital arm in October 2024.
• Built a platform that the company says secures more than 220 billion machine identity interactions for Fortune 500 customers across retail, financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals.
• Launched SecretlessAI, a credential-protection layer that brokers AI agents’ access to enterprise systems without exposing credentials to the agent.
• Announced Agentic Runtime Authority and Agentic Identity Intelligence on 31 March 2026, and brought Agentic Runtime Authority to general availability on 9 September 2026.
• Recognised at RSAC 2026 with Global InfoSec Awards market-leader recognition in identity management for AI agents and Cybersecurity Excellence Awards in AI agent identity security, machine identity security and secrets management.
• Previously Director of Product Management at Moovit, later acquired by Intel, and Senior Project Manager at CA Technologies.
• Veteran of an Israel Defense Forces cyber-security elite unit.

Professional Journey

Hareven’s security grounding came from military service in an IDF cyber-security elite unit, which in Israel functions as both a technical training ground and a professional network. His commercial career then ran through product and project management rather than engineering leadership — Senior Project Manager at CA Technologies, an incumbent in the identity and access management market, and Director of Product Management at Moovit, the public-transit application that Intel later acquired. The CA Technologies period is the more directly relevant: it put him inside the legacy identity and access management category whose assumptions Akeyless was built to overturn.

Akeyless was founded with Shai Onn and Refael Angel, within the orbit of Team8, the Israeli company-building venture firm that starts security companies around a defined enterprise problem. The problem here was that secrets management, as practised, did not survive contact with multi-cloud and DevOps. Machine identities are created and destroyed within minutes, credentials multiply across environments, and self-hosted vaults require the very operational discipline that fast-moving engineering organisations lack. Akeyless’s answer was to deliver secrets management as a service on a zero-knowledge, vaultless basis, with cryptography arranged so the vendor cannot read what it holds — a necessary condition for regulated customers to accept a SaaS secrets platform at all.

A $14 million Series A funded the early product, and in November 2022 a $65 million Series B led by NGP Capital, with Team8 Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners participating, took disclosed funding to $80 million. In October 2024 Deutsche Bank’s corporate venture capital arm made a strategic investment, an endorsement that matters commercially in a category where the customers are risk-averse financial institutions.

The company’s most recent phase, which Hareven has driven publicly, extends the machine identity thesis to autonomous AI. An AI agent presents a novel problem because it authenticates like a machine but behaves with a degree of discretion, so the meaningful control point moves from whether it has credentials to what it does with them. Akeyless approached this in two layers: SecretlessAI removes credentials from the agent entirely and brokers its access to enterprise systems, and Agentic Runtime Authority, announced on 31 March 2026 alongside Agentic Identity Intelligence and generally available from 9 September 2026, adds real-time intent-based access control over the agent’s actions. The company also published survey research arguing that AI agent deployment is outpacing the identity controls meant to govern it, and collected identity-management awards at RSAC 2026.

Education

Open University of Israel

Bachelor of Arts, Management and Economics