Open source software startup Cerbos has raised £2.6 million in a seed round.
Cerbos aims to help tech scaleups and other companies manage user permissions more efficiently amid growing software stacks.
High-growth technology companies, software agencies and large enterprises are finding that complex and varied levels of access are needed within their organisations, for example developers and software engineers, compliance officers, product managers and chief information and security officers.
The London-based company, which was founded in 2021 by Emre Baran and Charith Ellawala, helps customers save time and money as well as solve the growing access control compliance needs from regulation such as GDPR, SOC2, and ISO-27001.
Investment in the funding round was led by Crane with support from Earlybird Digital East, Seedcamp, 8-Bit Capital, Connect Ventures, OSS Capital, Acequia Capital, HelloWorld, Tiny and angel investors including Guillaume Pousaz, Paul Forster, Mike Stoppelman, Jeff Trudeau, Chris Barchak and Pete Koomen.
“Cerbos helps rapidly growing companies, particularly scale-ups, go to market quickly by cutting time and saving money when building their software,” said CEO Baran.
“For too long, engineers have been reinventing the wheel. Every time a team invests in a new piece of software, engineers have to reinvent the user permissions from scratch.
“This is particularly true in large enterprises, where different departments or teams need to use the same software platform for distinctly different functions. It is a time-consuming and cost-inefficient way of working.
“We’re enabling companies to be more compliant and making higher quality security available to every developer. We make it zero hassle to get up and running.”
Cerbos’ approach is open source, language-agnostic and enables users to pay as they grow.
Scott Sage, co-founder and partner of Crane Venture Partners, added: “It is well understood that user permission requirements get more complex as enterprise clients get bigger, and serve users in different roles, with a complex number of permission exceptions.
“To save companies from building this from scratch, Cerbos’ open-source approach radically simplifies user and role permissions by abstracting away the complexity.
“At Crane, we’ve been blown away by how much value their early users are already getting from the system.”