Hungarian cybersecurity startup Riptides, which offers a universal and transparent non-human identity solution, has secured $3.3 million in a pre-seed funding round led by PortfoLion Capital Partners, with support from KAYA VC.
- Founded in 2025 by Zsolt Varga, Nándor István Krácser, Márton Sereg, and János Mátyás, Riptides develops infrastructure software for assigning and managing identities for non-human entities such as services, workloads, and AI agents.
- The system replaces static credentials like API keys, tokens, and certificates with short-lived cryptographic identities. These identities are issued, rotated, and revoked automatically.
- Riptides integrates at the operating system kernel level and with orchestration tools such as Kubernetes and identity standards such as SPIFFE. It enforces identity-based access control between processes and services, supports mutual TLS, and logs identity usage.
Details of the deal
- The pre-seed round was led by PortfoLion Capital Partners, a Budapest-based venture capital and private equity arm of OTP Bank, which manages €440 million in assets and invests in startups across various sectors in the CEE region. Czech KAYA VC also joined the round.
- Additionally, the startup received a $500,000 investment from the founding team's fund, Cloudbreak, along with contributions from several undisclosed Hungarian and international angel investors.
- Riptides will use the $3.3 million to develop its system, which replaces API keys and passwords with automatically managed identities for machines and software.
- The funding will also go toward improving the core technology, working with early users, and helping organizations move away from manual credential management.
"This marks one of the biggest pre-seed rounds to date in Central and Eastern Europe. As machines, AI agents, and cloud-native services interact at scale, static secrets like API keys and tokens have become the weakest link in enterprise security. Riptides replaces them with cryptographically verifiable identities, purpose-built for non-human trust," Riptides' team, commented on LinkedIn.
