Act Security has made its first acquisition only a month after emerging from stealth, buying Cloud Copilot, an open-source project built to help engineers make sense of AWS access permissions.
The deal brings Cloud Copilot founder David Kerber to Act and gives the cybersecurity startup the foundation for Amphi, a new free, open-source toolkit aimed at one of the more persistent problems in cloud security: figuring out exactly who or what can access what before a permission change goes into production.
Act Security team
(Photo: Tammy Bar-Shay)
That problem has become more complicated as companies have accumulated cloud accounts, applications, workloads and, increasingly, AI agents. A single overly broad permission can create an access path that bypasses other security controls, yet determining the effective permissions of a role or policy can require navigating layers of AWS configurations.
Amphi is designed to make those questions easier to answer.
The toolkit includes seven tools for analyzing and testing AWS access policies. Engineers can use it to expand wildcard permissions into the specific actions they permit, simulate how a policy would respond to a particular request without changing a live environment and analyze existing policies to determine whether a role can reach a specific resource.
Other tools examine how AWS Organizations guardrails such as service control policies (SCPs) and resource control policies (RCPs) behave under different conditions. Amphi can also identify oversized policies and reduce them without changing the permissions they grant, as well as convert policies into infrastructure-as-code formats.
For Act, the acquisition is as much about reaching the engineers who manage cloud infrastructure as it is about adding another product.
“Every CISO we speak with wants to solve access sprawl, but infrastructure and platform teams are the ones actually managing the access behind those decisions,” said Jonathan Langer, Act’s co-founder and CEO. “Cloud Copilot had already earned trust with those engineers, policy by policy, without asking them to log in.”
Kerber started Cloud Copilot after encountering what he considered a basic problem: getting a straightforward answer about AWS permissions could be surprisingly difficult.
“I built the Cloud Copilot tools because I wanted straight answers that I could not get from the AWS documentation,” Kerber said.
That focus will remain under Act. Amphi will be available without an account or email address and can be used through a browser-based interface or an offline-capable command-line interface. Its source code will remain open on GitHub, where developers can submit issues and pull requests.
The acquisition is the first announced by Act since the company emerged from stealth in July with $60 million in funding. Founded in 2025, the startup is pursuing a broader approach to cloud security centered on restricting access rather than simply identifying security problems after they appear.
Act says it works to eliminate unnecessary access paths and limit what applications, workloads and AI agents can reach, enforcing those restrictions through cloud-native controls at the infrastructure layer.
The company was founded by Langer, CTO Itay Kirshenbaum, CPO Stephan Goldberg and VP of R&D Ilai Fallach. Langer and Kirshenbaum previously co-founded medical device security company Medigate, which was acquired by Claroty for $400 million. Goldberg was an early Medigate employee.
Act's investors include Team8, Bessemer Venture Partners, Notable Capital, Hetz Ventures, Claltech, Startpoint Capital and SVCI.