Former CyberArk and Cisco Leader Joins Akeyless as It Scales Identity Security for the Agentic Era

Yael Fainaro joins as Chief Strategy Officer to drive strategic partnerships and expand Akeyless ecosystem dominance

NEW YORK and TEL AVIV, Israel, April 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Akeyless, a company redefining identity security for the AI era, today announced the appointment of Yael Fainaro as Chief Strategy Officer (CSO). Fainaro will lead strategic partnerships and ecosystem expansion to help organizations address a rapidly escalating wave of AI-driven identity risk. She brings deep experience in corporate strategy, business development, and partnerships across cybersecurity. Fainaro previously held leadership roles in Corporate Development at CyberArk and Cisco, where she led global partnerships and growth initiatives. Most recently, she served as EVP Security and General Manager Israel at Synamedia, where she was also a customer of Akeyless.

As AI agents and machine identities scale rapidly, organizations are facing an unprecedented surge in non-human identities operating across cloud, SaaS, and internal systems. Akeyless has emerged as a leader in securing these identities at scale. The company supports hundreds of billions of workload identity transactions annually and is seeing strong enterprise adoption, including Fortune 500 customers.

Fainaro joins Akeyless at a pivotal moment. Traditional identity security models, built for humans and static access, cannot keep pace with the machine speeds driven by the rise of AI agents and the explosion of non-human identities. Organizations now require identity security that operates in real time, dynamically granting and revoking access as agents interact with critical systems and data. This shift requires not just eliminating standing privileges and long-lived credentials, but also enforcing security at runtime.

"Most identity solutions today are built for humans, fragmented across use cases, or limited in how they scale," said Fainaro. "Akeyless takes a different approach with a unified identity security platform that brings together humans, machines, and AI agents under a single control plane,  while operating at the scale required for AI-driven environments. With its unique Distributed Fragments Cryptography™ technology, recently announced Agentic Runtime Authority, and Agentic Identity Intelligence, Akeyless is uniquely positioned to lead this category."

With more than 130 integrations across cloud providers, security tools, and enterprise platforms, Akeyless enables seamless identity federation between systems — a critical capability in an increasingly connected, agent-driven world. Akeyless supports leading AI and agent frameworks, including LangChain, n8n, AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, Claude, and custom GPTs. Fainaro will lead strategic partnerships and scale the robust Akeyless ecosystem further working with cybersecurity and infrastructure leaders, hyperscalers, and the broader AI ecosystem.

The platform allows agents to securely access services across clouds and enables platforms such as ServiceNow and Databricks to interact with internal systems without introducing identity or exposure risk. Akeyless brings dynamic, identity-aware controls across API, application, and network layers, extending identity security as a control plane across enterprise environments and complementing existing network and application security layers with identity-first enforcement.

"Identity security is being fundamentally redefined by AI," said Oded Hareven, CEO and Co-Founder of Akeyless. "As non-human identities scale beyond anything legacy systems were designed to handle, organizations need a unified platform that operates at that same scale across clouds, machines, and AI agents in real time. Yael brings the experience and vision to help us expand our ecosystem and meet that demand globally."

Akeyless enables just-in-time identity creation, cross-cloud federation, and secure access for AI agents and workloads through a cloud-native zero-knowledge architecture designed for dynamic, agentic-scale environments. Akeyless' appointment of Fainaro reflects continued investment in strategic partnerships as a key driver of ecosystem growth and enterprise adoption.

About Akeyless

Trusted by Global 2000 enterprises and industry leaders, Akeyless is redefining identity security for the AI era. The company's Identity Security Platform delivers comprehensive protection for machines, AI agents, and humans through a single, cloud-native solution. Backed by leading cybersecurity investors including  JVP, Team8, NGP Capital, and Deutsche Bank, Akeyless enables organizations to secure AI agents, eliminate standing privileges and static credentials while simplifying identity management across all environments. For more information, visit www.akeyless.io.

SOURCE Akeyless