What does AKA Identity do?

AKA Identity embeds security engineers with AI-native teams to build purpose-built controls for AI agent systems.

Who founded AKA Identity?

AKA Identity was founded by William Lin in 2023.

Who are AKA Identity's investors?

AKA Identity's investors include Alumni Ventures, Basecamp Fund, ForgePoint Capital, M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund).

AKA Identity

Founded 2023 · 13 employees on LinkedIn · 4 known investors

Find your way into AKA Identity

90 people in our graph share verified history with the AKA Identity team — schools, employers, funds. One of them is your warm intro.

Kathryn Shihunlockedknows William Lin · together at ForgePoint Capital (overlapped)

×2knows the team · via ForgePoint Capital

×8knows the team · via Ballistic Ventures

knows the team · via Bishop Fox

AKA builds a security layer for AI agent systems, providing real-time monitoring and control of agent operations including prompt scanning and tool call enforcement. The company serves organizations deploying AI agents, offering both open-source and commercial security solutions.

Also known as AKA Security

AI & Machine Learning Cybersecurity Enterprise Software

Founders & leadership

AKA Identity was founded in 2023 by William Lin.

William Lin in 𝕏FounderWilliam Lin previously invested in and supported cybersecurity companies at Forgepoint Capital and co-created the Security Tinkerers community organization; he is now founder and CEO of AKA Identity.

Investors · 4

Alumni VenturesManchester · $100K – $10M

Basecamp FundManchester · $100K – $10M

ForgePoint CapitalSan Mateo · $5M – $50M

M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund)Seattle · $100K – $10M

Company profile

researched Aug 2026

AKA Identity, presenting itself publicly as AKA Security, provides security engineering and tooling for organizations building and running AI agent systems. Its stated model is to embed security developers with AI-native engineering teams to design purpose-built security controls, which a "Software Factory" then builds to production grade and maintains over time. The company positions this as tailoring security to a customer's existing environment rather than requiring the environment to change, with delivery of production capabilities described in terms of weeks.

The controls the company describes shipping include egress restriction (blocking calls to hosts that are not allowlisted), data protection (redacting protected health information before it reaches a model), execution gating (approval requirements for shell commands in production), and identity (least-privilege tokens for each MCP server). An audit capability, generating SOC 2 evidence from production logs, is described as in review rather than shipped.

Alongside delivery work, AKA maintains open-source projects. The primary one is AI Traffic Control (ai-tc), described as guardrails for the agent harness that keep regulated data on the local machine and scan every prompt and tool call before it runs, with enforcement performed locally so that PCI, PHI and PII data does not reach a model or third party. AI-TC is offered in Community and Enterprise editions. Other projects include claude-tools (a hardened baseline for Claude Code) and preflight-skills (multi-harness development skills), both listed as Community, with codex-tools (hardened baseline for Codex) and antigravity-tools (hardened baseline for Antigravity) listed as coming soon.

Compiled by commissioned research from 1 cited public sources — announcements, filings, and press listed under research sources below.

Key figures

latest reported

CertificationsJan 2026SOC 2 Type II; ISO 27001

Company-reported or press-reported figures, each dated to when it was claimed — not independently audited.

Competitors · 9

by search overlap

Cloudeagle6 shared keywordsCloudEagle.ai is a SaaS management platform that gives enterprises a single command center to discover, secure, govern, and optimize their SaaS and AI applications, identities, access, licenses, and renewals. It serves IT, security, and procurement teams with tools for spend optimization, procurement workflows, access governance, and identity lifecycle management.

Zluri5 shared keywordsZluri offers IVIP (Identity Visibility and Intelligence Platform), which discovers and inventories human and non-human identities across SaaS, cloud, and on-premises systems and maps their access paths through a unified identity graph. It provides continuous activity analysis and non-human identity governance to help security, IT, DevSecOps, and compliance teams detect and prioritize identity-related risks.

BeyondTrust (Bomgar Corporation)4 shared keywordsBeyondTrust provides privilege-centric identity security through its Pathfinder platform, helping organizations manage privileged access and defend against external attacks and insider threats. Its products cover the identity attack surface for enterprise customers, including AI agent security.

Netezza4 shared keywordsIBM is a global technology company whose business spans enterprise software (including Red Hat, HashiCorp, and Confluent), IT infrastructure such as mainframes, servers, and storage, and IT consulting services. The company is also investing heavily in quantum computing and AI-based enterprise offerings, including its Lightwell open-source software security clearinghouse and the Anderon quantum wafer foundry.

Okta4 shared keywordsOkta provides identity and access management products designed to protect the identities of workforce and customer users. The company serves enterprises and organizations that need to manage identity authentication and authorization across digital environments.

Quest3 shared keywordsQuest Software provides a data-centric product suite for enterprises, including a trusted data management platform, AI-assisted data modeling, cybersecurity and identity security tools, and platform modernization. Its products serve large organizations, including over 90% of Fortune 500 companies.

Delinea (FKA Centrify Corporation)3 shared keywordsDelinea provides an identity security control plane that enables real-time, context-aware access decisions across multi-cloud and on-premises environments for enterprises. The platform helps security teams govern access to data, infrastructure, and AI systems while automating privilege management and risk evaluation.

Ping Identity3 shared keywordsPing Identity provides identity management and access solutions designed to enable secure, scalable digital growth. The company serves enterprises seeking seamless identity infrastructure.

Crowdstrike3 shared keywordsCrowdStrike provides an AI-native cybersecurity platform that unifies endpoint, identity, cloud, SaaS, and AI protection to detect and stop breaches for enterprise organizations. It combines automated response with human-led security operations including managed detection and response, threat hunting, and security services.

Companies competing with AKA Identity for the same Google search keywords, organic and paid, via search-intersection analysis.

▸Research sources · 1

primary sources listed

AKA Identityakaidentity.io · web

1 public sources were cited for this profile; the first-party ones are listed here.

Frequently asked questions

What does AKA Identity do?: AKA Identity embeds security engineers with AI-native teams to build purpose-built controls for AI agent systems.
Who founded AKA Identity?: AKA Identity was founded by William Lin in 2023.
Who are AKA Identity's investors?: AKA Identity's investors include Alumni Ventures, Basecamp Fund, ForgePoint Capital, M12 (Microsoft's Venture Fund).