Cerbos, a company that aims to simplify the way software developers and engineers manage user permissions in their products has unveiled a new managed cloud service and secured $7.5M in seed funding.
As per the company, Cerbos Cloud makes it easier to manage permission policies, test modifications, and distribute updates in real time. It comes across as a solution for developers looking to save time, optimise workflows, and safely roll out authorization updates, allowing them to focus on building products and improving the end-user experience.
Cerbos, founded in 2021 by former Google employee Emre Baran and serial entrepreneur Charith Ellawala, intends to improve the way digital scaleups and companies handle permissions in their software stacks.
The co-founders Emre Baran (CEO) and Charith Ellawala (CTO) met while working at Qubit, where they built the data infrastructure that handled over 25 billion events per day in real time. They found the same challenges with developers building their own permission code there, as well as at Google, Elastic, and CGI, because there was no scalable, flexible, and simple-to-use off-the-shelf solution available. Each additional business authorisation requirement resulted in increasingly sophisticated logic, several iterations, and extensive rewrites.
Baran and Ellawala founded the company as a result of their frustration with the time-consuming, challenging, and messy process of implementing, scaling, and maintaining access control logic. Their goal is to make authorization easier to implement and manage so that developers can concentrate on creating their core products and generating business value. Cerbos unveiled its open source authorisation solution later that year.
The offering is all about separating the authorization process from the primary codebase of an application, making it easier to scale their access management system as a company and its software matures – this is especially crucial when businesses shift from monolithic software to microservices.
“Decoupling authorization makes life easier for both developers as well as product managers and security teams who create the requirements. Once implemented, the developers can focus on the rest of their job without having to deal with every change in access control logic,” said Emre Baran, co-founder and CEO of Cerbos. “We are launching Cerbos Cloud today to take away the operational burden of managing, testing and deploying changes. Developers can now spend even more of their valuable time delivering great products instead of maintaining the infrastructure of the authorization layer.”
“If it wasn’t for Cerbos, one thing is for sure – we would have launched later than we did. As a result, we would have less customers. The maintenance is also a very important aspect. Our technical team would be dealing with daily tasks regarding access controls, access logs. Now, we don’t have to spend any time on that,” said Engin Attar, co-founder and head of product and growth at Debite, a financing platform for early-stage and high-growth startups and businesses.
Torsten Volk, managing research director at Enterprise Management Associates, said, “Writing and managing repetitive code for the ‘plumbing’ of their software is the bane of most developers’ existence. In the case of authorization code, the resulting inconsistencies and errors can also negatively affect the sleep cycles of CIOs, CTOs, CCOs and CSOs when the time of an audit rolls around. Replacing this mess with a centrally managed authorization layer that is pre-integrated with the existing corporate identity provider and directory would therefore be a big deal for both dev and ops personas alike. I applaud Cerbos for taking on this challenge.”
With its $7.5M extended seed round, Cerbos has brought in a slew of new institutional and angel investors, including Omers Ventures, Chime co-founder Ryan King, former Palo Alto Networks CMO Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir, early GitHub engineer Zach Holman, Warp founder Zach Lloyd, and Brevan Howard Digital CTO Lewis Tuff. The company had previously raised $3.5M in a seed round. The total funding raised to date is $11M.
The London-based startup intends to use the fresh funds to expand its offerings.
“Cerbos has created an elegant, low-code solution to a widespread problem the founding team experienced first-hand in previous roles, which is always a solid starting point when we are looking for investments with break-out potential. And as user authorization becomes increasingly important in the modern tech stack, the Cerbos team has a relentless focus on providing the most scalable solution. We feel privileged to play a role in this journey that’s only just getting started,” said Harry Briggs, Managing Partner at OMERS Ventures.
Image credits: vitanovski/Depositphotos
