Akeyless has announced the appointment of Yael Fainaro as Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), reinforcing its focus on expanding strategic partnerships and scaling its ecosystem to address the growing risks associated with AI-driven identities. Fainaro joins the company with extensive experience in corporate strategy, business development, and cybersecurity partnerships. She previously held leadership roles in corporate development at CyberArk and Cisco, where she led global growth initiatives. Most recently, she served as EVP of Security and General Manager for Israel at Synamedia, where she also worked closely with Akeyless as a customer.
Her appointment comes at a time when organizations are facing a rapid increase in non-human identities driven by AI agents and automated systems operating across cloud platforms, SaaS environments, and internal infrastructure. Akeyless has positioned itself as a key player in this space, supporting hundreds of billions of workload identity transactions annually and gaining traction among large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies.
Fainaro noted that traditional identity security frameworks designed primarily for human users are no longer sufficient in today’s dynamic, machine-driven environments. She emphasized the need for real-time identity security models that can dynamically manage access as AI agents interact with sensitive systems and data. According to her, Akeyless’ unified platform enables organizations to manage human, machine, and AI identities within a single control plane while maintaining scalability for modern enterprise demands.
The company’s approach includes technologies such as Distributed Fragments Cryptography™ and its recently introduced Agentic Runtime Authority and Agentic Identity Intelligence, which aim to provide real-time, runtime-level identity enforcement. These capabilities are designed to eliminate persistent credentials and enable just-in-time access controls.
Akeyless has also built a broad integration ecosystem, with more than 130 integrations across cloud providers, enterprise platforms, and security tools. Its platform supports leading AI and automation frameworks such as LangChain, n8n, AWS Bedrock, Vertex AI, and Claude, as well as custom GPT-based systems. These integrations enable secure identity federation and allow AI agents to interact safely across distributed environments.
The platform further enables enterprise tools like ServiceNow and Databricks to securely connect with internal systems without introducing identity-related vulnerabilities. By extending identity-aware controls across APIs, applications, and networks, Akeyless aims to establish identity as a central control layer within enterprise security architectures.
Oded Hareven, CEO and Co-Founder of Akeyless, stated that the rapid growth of non-human identities is fundamentally reshaping identity security requirements. He added that Fainaro’s expertise will be instrumental in expanding the company’s global ecosystem and meeting the increasing demand for scalable, real-time identity solutions With this leadership addition, Akeyless continues to invest in strengthening its partner ecosystem and advancing its cloud-native, zero-knowledge platform designed to deliver secure, just-in-time identity access for AI agents, workloads, and enterprise systems operating at scale.
