Ploy raises £2.5m as 93% of businesses suffer multiple identity breaches annually
Ploy raises £2.5M to transform identity governance with AI. Cut identity management time by 90% with automated workflows and Luna, your AI copilot.
The round
London, 15th October 2025: UK cybersecurity startup Ploy has raised £2.5m to address a growing security threat, with 93% of organisations suffering two or more identity-related breaches per year.
The round was led by Osney Capital, with participation from Superseed, Tiny.vc and Rule30, alongside notable angels including Johnathan Scudder (co-founder of ForgeRock), Alastair Paterson and James Chappell (co-founders of Digital Shadows), Mark Ryan (VP of Product Management at ZScaler), Jonathan Tom (VP of GTM Enablement at Rapid7), Tony Pepper and Neil Larkins (co-founders of Egress) and Charles Delingpole (co-founder of ComplyAdvantage, MarketFinance and The Student Room).
Why now
The funding comes at an important juncture for enterprise security. With 80% of cyberattacks now leveraging identity-based methods, and each critical identity-related security alert consuming 11 person-hours on average, organisations are overwhelmed by identity complexity.
The rapid proliferation of AI agents and non-human identities has also created a new attack surface that legacy tools weren’t built to handle.
Legacy IGA wasn’t built for this
Legacy Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) tools often take years to implement and were designed for on-premise environments that no longer reflect how modern companies operate.
With the majority of businesses now running distributed technology stacks across hundreds of SaaS applications, these outdated approaches leave security teams blind to identity risks and drowning in manual processes.
What Ploy does
Founded by CTO Harry Lucas and CEO Jacob Prime, both former leaders at Metomic, Ploy makes access secure and compliant by automating identity processes — from onboarding and offboarding to access requests and reviews — across SaaS, cloud and collaboration tools.
The platform comes with pre-built integrations and automated workflows that let companies see every access grant and start automating identity processes in under 20 minutes. Designed for the underserved mid-market segment of companies with up to 5,000 employees, Ploy combines modern cloud architecture with an embedded AI assistant, Luna, giving security teams the intelligence to spot anomalies and make context-rich access decisions.
Traction
The platform has already secured over 1 million individual access entitlements and discovered more than 26,000 SaaS applications that use companies’ identities across its customer base.
Ploy’s growing customer base includes fast-growth companies like Payfit, Not On The High Street, Welcome to the Jungle, ComplyAdvantage, Liberis and Times Higher Education. Ellie Mental Health, which has experienced rapid headcount growth in recent years, uses Ploy to identify risky access entitlements within seconds of detection.
“Identity sprawl has become a significant issue for organisations of all shapes and sizes, but particularly those with modern technology stacks. Ploy’s just-in-time approach to access is becoming the only approach that scales with modern threats.”
What’s next
The rapidly growing startup has already doubled revenue with just four employees, having raised in 2024 from strategic angels. This new round of VC funding will accelerate Ploy’s product development and scale its go-to-market as market demand continues to grow globally.
“Spreadsheet-based access tracking is now a legal and security liability. Teams need real-time visibility into who has access to what, before attackers or regulators find the gaps.”
The market
The global Identity Governance and Administration market is projected to grow from $7.1bn in 2023 to $23.4bn by 2032, driven by the convergence of stricter regulations, AI adoption, and the recognition that identity has become the primary attack vector for cybercriminals.
With thousands of mid-market companies still managing identity through manual processes, Ploy is redefining identity governance and setting the benchmark for how organisations worldwide secure and manage access.
About Ploy
Ploy is a cloud-first Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform that automates user access management across the entire employee lifecycle. Founded in 2023 by former Metomic leaders Harry Lucas and Jacob Prime, Ploy helps IT and security teams manage access to SaaS applications, databases, cloud platforms and collaboration tools through automated workflows and AI-powered insights. The company is headquartered in Shoreditch, London.