Okta Ventures Request for Builders: Five key focus areas in Identity and security

Okta Ventures partners and invests in early-stage startups building Identity-enabled platforms. In a world increasingly shaped by rapid technological advances, 2025 presents unparalleled opportunities and significant challenges for enterprises, developers, and innovators.  The rise of generative AI has revolutionized industries, but it’s also been weaponized to exploit vulnerabilities, accelerate fraud, and undermine trust. Cybersecurity threats are evolving faster than ever, and Identity is the frontline defense against these risks.

At Okta Ventures, we believe that Identity lies at the heart of navigating this shifting landscape. Whether it’s safeguarding software supply chains, protecting small businesses, or preparing for the quantum era, Identity security is foundational to building trust, preventing breaches, and enabling innovation. As cyberthreats grow more sophisticated, securing how individuals and systems interact across applications, devices, and networks has never been more critical. Startups play a critical role in this mission, bringing bold ideas and fresh perspectives to the forefront of the digital economy.

This year Okta’s Request for Builders highlights five cutting-edge areas where Okta Ventures sees immense potential for innovation.

Data governance for agents

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) is a method of regulating access to data based on the roles of individual users within an organization. Permissions to access specific data resources are assigned to roles, and users are then assigned to those roles.

The rise of agentic workflows breaks many assumptions around RBAC implementations. Whereas a data governance model for humans may have assumed a certain amount of permissioned access, agents have superhuman capabilities and access to significantly larger amounts of data in new and unique ways. Okta Ventures' portfolio company Immuta is addressing many of these issues, and this space is one to watch in 2025. Data governance in an agentic world will undergo a rapid evolution and reassessment.

New user interfaces for the Age of AI

Identity and Access Management professionals are used to working in standard graphical user interfaces. With the influx of LLM-powered interfaces, users are beginning to demand simpler, more intuitive interfaces versus complicated dashboards for managing their software. Additionally, users are becoming accustomed to context windows that have "working memory" from conversations and inputs the model can retain and use to generate subsequent responses. Agentic experiences have personalization, variable user control, and human-like interaction qualities.

What does the future of software interaction look like? What does conversing with a software provider look like? Can you have a digital twin at work that can handle your workflows? It’s unclear if this shift will result in standalone startups or if it’s simply part of a cresting wave of broad-based industry innovation. Users are looking for "concierge-level service" where they receive the right recommendations at the right time and get answers  by simply asking natural language questions. The future of work will require humans and agents to work together seamlessly.

Agentic payment rails 

Imagine you are building a news website in 2025. You know that an ever-increasing number of potential subscribers will access your site’s articles and data on your website and via LLM models. Rather than building a paywall for humans to insert their usernames and passwords,  you could build an agentic auth layer that allows agents to access your data and pay as they go. Instead of one-size-fits-all subscriptions, the media landscape could offer bite-size, microtransactions for an agentic economy. Fraudulent transactions could still occur, so a whole new set of checks needs to be created. Fintech companies operating in agentic payments will likely be adept at managing Identity workflows for the same bots they used to block. One startup doing interesting work in this area is Skyfire.xyz. Similarly, Stripe is beginning to offer some frameworks in this space to create single-use virtual cards for business purchases and, in turn, provide spending controls to set budgets and limit spending for agents.

Bridging physical and digital Identity

The line between physical and digital identities is blurring as autonomous systems, robotic systems, smart infrastructure, and aerial technologies become deeply embedded in our daily lives. Drones, IoT devices, and robotics now require secure authentication, permissions management, and compliance frameworks – just as human identities do. The challenge is no longer just securing users but also verifying and authorizing non-human entities operating in physical spaces, including airspace. Imagine a robot operating within your home – what rooms and activities do you authorize it to conduct on your behalf? How will it authenticate your commands either verbally or through agentic workflows? Will your future home have sensors to authenticate a drone delivery to your doorstep?

As enterprises and governments adopt autonomous technologies at scale, identity will be the foundation for ensuring trust, accountability, and interoperability across digital and physical environments. At Okta Ventures, we see this convergence as a frontier for innovation, where identity security must evolve to meet the demands of an increasingly interconnected world.

Post-quantum cryptography: "Future-proofing Identity Security"

Quantum computing poses a potential threat to traditional cryptographic methods. Post-quantum cryptography develops algorithms and protocols resistant to quantum attacks, ensuring long-term security for identity systems and sensitive data.

Future-proofing identity infrastructure can ensure it remains secure against emerging quantum threats. Okta Ventures is interested in speaking to companies with unique approaches to future risks of quantum computing breaking classic encryption schemes. Recent breakthroughs in the field from Google and other market leaders has indicated the post-quantum world may be closer than imagined even a year ago.

Join us in tackling the challenges we discussed and building the future of Identity. If you are building in these areas, we want to hear from you. Drop us a note at [email protected] or visit okta.com/okta-ventures to learn more about how we invest, support, and partner with our portfolio companies.