Gábor Zoltán, CEO of the Hungarian security startup Riptides, today announced the successful closing of the company’s $3.3 million pre-seed funding round. The company intends to use the investment to continue developing its platform for secure non-human identity management. This round of funding is now Hungary’s largest pre-seed round to date.

Riptides’ Seed funding round was led jointly by PortfoLion Capital Partners and Kaya VC. Cloudbreak participated with a $500K investment.

The firm’s platform is perfectly positioned to meet the increasing demand to protect the identities of non-humans. These identities now far outnumber human users, but are often left vulnerable. Riptides’ long-term goal is to offer a comprehensive solution for surfacing and managing these unexpected vulnerabilities.

Márton Sereg, co-founder and CEO of Riptides pointed to the role of identity in machine-to-machine communication.

"Riptides is building the infrastructure that makes this possible. Because in a world where machines talk to machines, identity is everything.” - Márton Sereg

Riptides uses identities as a first-class data type. In Riptides, workloads and agents use unified, cryptographic identities. Sharing this logic through DTOs ensures that communication between AI agents, data center services, and third-party integrations is secure and consistent. The company’s solution works much deeper into the kernel for highly tamper-proof security that minimizes friction.

The Riptides squad is made up of seasoned pros. Among them are Zsolt Varga, former early engineering lead of Banzai Cloud, and Nándor Krácser, the CISO from 15 years at Cisco, IBM. János Mátyás, Head of R&D, co-founded Banzai Cloud and SequenceIQ.

Karel Zheng, investor at Kaya VC, described how the non-human identity is vulnerable.

"Non-human identities now outnumber human logins by orders of magnitude, yet they remain the weakest link in cloud and AI stacks. Riptides hard‑wires into the kernel, giving enterprises a tamper‑proof, zero‑friction way to secure every service‑to‑service call.” - Karel Zheng

Riptides is typical of a growing wave of Hungarian-founded security startups making a name for themselves internationally. Through an experimental process, their vision is to create a template for the future of non-human identity management.

"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." - Márton Sereg

Daniel Kiss-Kiraly also commented on the potential of Riptides' team.

"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." - Daniel Kiss-Kiraly

"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." - Daniel Kiss-Kiraly

"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