Hush Security Surfaces from Stealth with $11M to End the Era of Vaults

Hush Security, the first comprehensive secretless, policy-based access platform for securing machine identities, today announced it has raised $11 million in seed funding led by Battery Ventures and YL Ventures. As agentic AI surges, Hush replaces legacy vaults and secrets across the enterprise with just-in-time, policy-driven access controls enforced at runtime. This novel approach eliminates the operational and security risks of traditional vaults and secrets managers, delivering a faster, safer way to secure machine-to-machine access.

A Breakthrough in Machine Access

For years, vaults have been the default method of protecting API keys, credentials, and service accounts. But vaults don’t actually solve the problem—they simply hold the risk in a different place. As cloud environments shift by the second and AI agents multiply across pipelines, static secrets have become liabilities: they linger too long, spread too widely, and are prime targets for attackers.

Hush takes a different path. Instead of storing secrets, the platform issues just-in-time, right-sized access that only exists for the few moments it’s needed. Once the task is complete, the access disappears. That means no long-lived credentials to steal, no forgotten keys buried in code, and no operational overhead of constantly rotating passwords or tokens. Security becomes dynamic, adaptive, and invisible to the developer workflow.

A Bold Founding Vision

The company is led by the team behind Meta Networks (acquired by Proofpoint in 2019), who saw first-hand the limits of secret-based models. “Vaults were built for an era where environments changed slowly and AI was not part of the equation. That era is over,” said CEO and co-founder Micha Rave. “AI agents, ephemeral workloads, and automation have changed the game, and the vault model can’t keep up. We’ve eliminated the need for credentials entirely.”

Battery Ventures and YL Ventures see this as a watershed moment. “Static secrets simply can’t keep pace with modern infrastructure, rapid development cycles, and the demands of AI-driven workloads,” said Battery’s Barak Schoster. “This is the beginning of the end for credential-based attacks.”

Built for Zero Trust; Designed for DevOps

Hush’s architecture is grounded in Zero Trust principles, with access tied to behavior and identity rather than static credentials. Built on the SPIFFE standard (Secure Production Identity Framework For Everyone), the system unifies security, DevOps, and developer workflows into a single model. Instead of adding another dashboard or layer of complexity, it runs silently in the background—removing secrets while making compliance easier and reducing blind spots.

Despite operating in stealth, Hush already counts multiple Fortune 500s among its early customers. The funding will accelerate engineering growth and global go-to-market efforts. To encourage adoption, the company is offering a free assessment tool that identifies embedded secrets, maps their use across code and runtime, and lays out a clear path toward secretless infrastructure.

Why This Matters for the Future of Security

The launch of Hush Security arrives at a critical inflection point. Agentic AI and ephemeral workloads are no longer side experiments; they are becoming fundamental to enterprise operations. In this new landscape, vaults and static secrets pose more risk than protection. Credentials linger long after they’re needed, often becoming the weakest link in otherwise modernized systems.

By shifting to dynamic policies enforced at runtime, Hush Security points toward a future where access is as temporary and adaptive as the workloads it secures. Instead of broad, standing privileges, access can exist only for the few seconds it’s required, then vanish. This aligns with Zero Trust principles while pushing them deeper into the machine-to-machine layer, where automation and AI are reshaping how organizations work.

The ripple effects could be far-reaching. Eliminating secrets challenges long-held assumptions about how software is built, how compliance frameworks are designed, and how attackers operate. Credential theft has historically been one of the most common and inexpensive attack vectors. Removing the very concept of secrets could upend that equation, raising the cost of attacks while reducing the operational burden on defenders.

For that reason, Hush Security’s emergence isn’t just another startup launch—it’s an early signal of an industry-wide transformation. As AI agents proliferate and infrastructure grows ever more dynamic, the end of secrets may mark the beginning of a more adaptive, resilient model of digital trust.