Building Trust Infrastructure in the AI and Quantum Era: Our Investment in Keyfactor

By Andrew Collins and Colin Mistele, Managing Directors

For much of the internet’s history, the identities that mattered were human — the usernames and passwords people use to prove who they are. We believe that balance has shifted. Today, more identities inside the enterprise belong to machines: servers, applications, cloud workloads, APIs, devices, IoT sensors and, increasingly, AI agents, each relying on cryptographic keys and certificates to authenticate and securely communicate. Managing those identities at scale has, in our view, become one of the more consequential and under-addressed problems in enterprise security. It is what drew us to Keyfactor, which we believe offers a more complete independent platform for securing the machine identities and cryptography that enterprises run on. Today, Summit Partners is proud to announce our investment in Keyfactor.

We are seeing several forces that were once slow-moving begin to converge, making trust infrastructure more of a board-level priority. Machines now vastly outnumber humans, and AI agents are accelerating that growth. We’re seeing certificate lifespans compress, from years to weeks, multiplying renewals and making manual management increasingly difficult. Regulators are raising expectations around cryptographic inventory and governance. We believe advances in quantum computing are prompting many organizations to reevaluate the encryption they rely on today. This includes not only the prospect that some current encryption methods could become vulnerable, but also the “harvest now, decrypt later” risk, where encrypted data collected today could be decrypted as quantum capabilities mature. Taken together, these trends are contributing to a shift in the ways organizations view trust infrastructure – from a tactical, operational necessity to a strategic initiative  that increasingly receives board-level attention.

Policy is now helping to reinforce these trends. In June 2026, the White House issued an executive order directing federal agencies and their contractors to migrate to NIST’s post-quantum standards ahead of 2030. Federal mandates of this kind can pull the broader regulated economy along, and because any migration begins with discovering where cryptographic assets reside, we believe the executive order surfaces a problem that many enterprises are only beginning to confront.

Much of the existing tooling we see in the market handles only a single stage of the certificate lifecycle, often requiring enterprises to stitch together fragmented tools and processes, an approach that can fail when one expired certificate can take down a critical system. Keyfactor’s Trust Control Plane is designed to span the full arc: discovering cryptographic assets, issuing trusted identities to machines, workloads and AI agents across the organization, automating the lifecycle, and helping to provide organizations a clearer path to quantum-ready cryptography.

We believe the breadth of Keyfactor’s platform stands out in the market. The company manages billions of machine identities each year for more than 2,500 customers, including more than 40% of the Fortune 100, with penetration in financial services, banking, technology, healthcare, telecom, and the U.S. federal government, where it recently achieved FedRAMP certification. We believe Keyfactor is positioned to be a defining platform in this category, and we are proud to partner with CEO Jordan Rackie and the team as they work to build trust infrastructure for the AI and quantum era.

Read more: Keyfactor Announces $1B+ Strategic Growth Investment Led by Summit Partners to Expand Leadership in Securing the AI and Post-Quantum Enterprise

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The content herein reflects the views and opinions of Summit Partners and is intended for executives and operators considering partnering with Summit Partners. The content herein is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a solicitation, or an offer to buy or sell any security or investment product. The information herein has not been independently verified by Summit Partners or an independent party.

AI technology is evolving rapidly, and the full scope of its impact — including associated opportunities, risks, and regulatory implications — remains uncertain. Material risks inherent to AI initiatives include dependence on data quality and completeness, variability in model outputs, evolving compliance obligations and the execution challenges of implementing AI on legacy systems or poorly structured data. AI tools cannot substitute for sound data governance, and organizations should not assume AI will resolve underlying data quality issues.

Any reference to “expertise,” “expert,” or similar descriptions of knowledge or proficiency reflect the subjective assessment of Summit Partners and is intended solely to indicate familiarity with a subject area. Such characterizations should not be construed or relied upon as an indication of future performance or other future outcomes.

Information herein is as of July 2026.

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