Riptides, a startup securing machine-to-machine trust, has raised $3.3 million in pre-seed funding to launch its platform for secure non-human identity management. This marks one of the largest pre-seed rounds in Central and Eastern Europe ever, and Hungary’s biggest one to date (surpassing Kodesage‘s from earlier this year)
The funding round, led by Hungarian-based PortfoLion Capital Partners and Czech-based Kaya VC, will support product development, security research, and early design partnerships. The founding team’s fund Cloudbreak also contributes with a $500K investment. A number of Hungarian and international angel investors are also joining the round. Riptides is now actively engaging with enterprises and AI-first companies seeking to move beyond legacy secrets management.
Riptides is part of a new wave of Hungarian-founded security startups gaining international traction, following in the footsteps of companies like SEON, which back in 2022 raised $94M to tackle identity fraud.
The Riptides founding team brings deep cloud-native and enterprise security expertise, with a track record of successful exits. CEO Márton Sereg and Head of R&D János Mátyás previously co-founded Banzai Cloud (acquired by Cisco) and SequenceIQ (acquired by Hortonworks). CTO Zsolt Varga, an early hire at Banzai Cloud, quickly turned into a key member of the team and post-acquisition, became an engineering leader for Cisco’s agentic AI infrastructure product. CISO Nándor Krácser brings over 15 years of experience building secure infrastructure at Cisco and IBM, and also has startup experience as a core employee at Ustream, which was acquired by IBM.
“When we learned that Márton, Zsolt, Nándor, and János were leaving Cisco to build something new, we immediately knew they were the team we wanted to partner with again after our joint success at Banzai Cloud. Companies spend billions of dollars annually on identity and access management solutions, yet these lack proper functionality to manage thousands of non-human identities that are often over-privileged and forgotten. We are excited to back the Riptides team as they build the new standard in NHI management for the age of agentic workflows—an era where non-human interactions are set to explode,” Daniel Kiss-Kiraly, VC at PortfoLion Capital Partners, commented.
Cyberattacks Involving Non-Human Identities Are Increasing Rapidly
Non-human identities now outnumber human users by 50x, yet remain the most underprotected attack surface in enterprise systems. As machines increasingly interact without human mediation, legacy security tools built for static secrets (like API keys, tokens, and certificates) are no longer fit for purpose. As a result, the risks tied to underprotected non-human identities are now materializing in high-profile breaches.
“Riptides hard‑wires into the kernel, giving enterprises a tamper‑proof, zero‑friction way to secure every service‑to‑service call. We’re excited to back Márton, Zsolt and the Budapest team as they build the non-human identity layer of the modern internet,” Karel Zheng, investor at KAYA VC, said.
In 2024, a compromised machine token used in BeyondTrust’s Remote Support SaaS platform led to a significant breach of systems used by the U.S. Department of the Treasury – just one of many recent examples exposing the growing threat posed by underprotected non-human identities. A static credential gave attackers privileged access, bypassing the kinds of controls designed for human users.
Riptides eliminates the need for manually managed credentials by replacing APIs keys, tokens, and passwords with cryptographically verifiable identities that are automatically issued and rotated. These identities allow agents and workloads to authenticate each other, encrypt connections, and control access without relying on static secrets.
“By adopting unified, cryptographic identities for workloads and agents, we can secure communications across AI agents, data center services, and third-party integrations in a consistent, and transparent way. This approach paves the way for true zero-trust connectivity at scale. Riptides is building the infrastructure that makes this possible. Because in a world where machines talk to machines, identity is everything.” says Márton Sereg, co-founder and CEO of Riptides.
