Breaking the cybersecurity poverty line: How Stackbob is transforming enterprise IAM

Most small and medium-sized businesses face a dangerous paradox: they need robust Identity and Access Management to protect their data and systems, but the traditional IAM platforms designed for enterprises — with their six-month implementations, mandatory consultant fees, and requirement to upgrade every software tool to expensive enterprise plans — aren't built for companies of their size.

I came across Stackbob.ai during a recent visit to Lviv for the IT Arena conference. It's a Ukraine-founded startup that uses AI to help SMEs and mid-market companies overcome the cybersecurity poverty line, where IAM has traditionally been too complex, too slow, and too costly for anyone but large enterprises.

The company won two prizes in the pitch competition at IT Arena 2025:  3rd prize in the Business Track and the most interesting startup of the IT Arena.

It's built a cybersecurity platform that helps businesses manage employee access across all the software tools they use.

I spoke to CEO Ole Shved to learn more. 

From $100M exit team to starting over in wartime Ukraine

According to Shved, everything really started ten years ago. He'd worked at several B2B startups and at his last company before StackBob, he met his current co-founder, Yarik Rozum, when he hired him as one of the lead engineers. 

The duo worked together for about three years. That company—called Ad-Lib—was later acquired by Smartly.io for around $100 million. 

He admits, "We were employees there, not founders, but it was still an incredible experience being part of an exit." At the end of 2021, Rozum went to work for a Seattle-based company, and while Shved (originally from Kyiv) was figuring out what to do next in Lviv, Russia's invasion of UK started.

"When the war broke out, everything changed. We started helping people evacuate, driving them to the borders, and buying supplies for the army.

For a while, I should go and fight, because everyone around me was so motivated. But there were long lines everywhere to join, and a friend of mine in Kyiv told me it was the same there. Eventually, when Kyiv became safer, I went back. When I got back to Kyiv, I met with Yarik again.

He said, 'We've always wanted to do something together, and it turns out life is finite — you never know when you might die. Maybe we should do it now.' And that's how StackBob started."

Breaking the "API and SSO tax"

SStackbob's proprietary AI agents automate access and license management without SAML SSO or SCIM API integrations, cutting implementation from months to days and making enterprise-grade IAM affordable to companies that were previously locked out.

tackbob's focus is on small and midsize businesses —" we call it breaking the cybersecurity poverty line, shared Shved. 

"Those are the organisations that need protection and automation but can't afford or manage enterprise-level IAM systems."

According to Shved, existing IAM platforms like Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and others all share three significant issues because they're built on older generations of technology.

"The first problem is what we call the API and SSO tax. If you're a midsize company and want to manage employee access centrally across all your tools, you have to upgrade every single one of those tools to its enterprise plan — because the connectivity features are locked there.

So you pay for the most expensive plan just to get SSO access."

"It's basically a massive vendor lock-in, he shared, asserting, "I sometimes call it a cartel."

"It's even become standard advice for startups: 'Just add SSO and call it an enterprise plan, then charge two, three, or four times more.

For midsize companies, it's ridiculous—they can't afford that. It's a huge burden."

The second problem is the setup complexity. Implementing these systems takes months — sometimes six, nine, or even twelve months — and requires highly skilled engineers or consultants.  Shved shared that this is standard for many Series A or Series B companies.

"And in the end, you still have parts of the stack that can't be integrated because there's no compatible protocol. So you end up managing some tools manually or using spreadsheets."

So the team thought: How can we do this differently? How can we minimise our reliance on APIs and legacy protocols such as SAML or SCIM?

From APIs to AI agents

After several iterations, the idea emerged to utilise AI agents and browser automation for integrating and managing any web application. 

"That means we don't need APIs at all, and the company doesn't need to upgrade to enterprise plans," Shved explained.

"You simply invite our agent — just an email address—to your software tools.

It acts as an AI administrator in the cloud and uses browser automation to perform actions like onboarding, , password resets, and permission changes, exactly as a human would do in a web interface."

Closing the offboarding gap

Critically, Stackbob also solves the problem of offboarding — I know I'm not the only one who has had access to an ex-employer's accounts months after leaving.

Shved often finds that employees leave, but their accounts stay active across CRMs, analytics tools, or internal systems. 

"It's a serious security gap, and most companies don't even realise it until there's an incident. Our agents automatically detect and revoke access across every integrated tool, without needing traditional IAM setup."

The platform also addresses shadow IT — where employees use tools or apps without approval – by automatically discovering all the tools employees log into, "even the ones management doesn't know about. It gives full visibility."

To achieve this, Stackbob built its own integration engine supported by a pretrained model that helps automate the process.  As a result, it can integrate all your applications — third-party, custom-built, or even legacy tools. 

According to Shved, "as long as there's a browser interface for managing users, our agent can work with it.

"If it runs in a browser, we can manage it"

"Our marketing team likes to say we can integrate with more than 300,000 applications. It's probably true! Basically, if it runs in a browser, we can manage it."

Stackbob started a little over three years ago and, in 2023,  joined the Techstars Seattle accelerator, which helped it expand into the US market and start signing US customers.

Currently, the company is expanding into the UK and Nordic markets to strengthen its European presence, and with its growing customer base

Ultimately, Stackbob is proving that there's significant demand for IAM solutions built for the 99 per cent of companies left behind by traditional platforms.