INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Scytale, a startup that wants to bring identity and access management to application-to-application activities, announced a $5 million
Series A round today.The round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, a return investor that led the company’s previous $3 million round
Bain Capital Ventures, TechOperators and Work-Bench are also participating in this round.The company wants to bring to applications and
services in a cloud native environment the same kind of authentication that individuals are used to having with a tool like Okta
“What we’re focusing on is trying to bring to market a capability for large enterprises going through this transition to cloud native
computing to evolve the existing methods of application to application authentication, so that it’s much more flexible and scalable,”
company CEO Sunil James told TechCrunch.To help with this, the company has developed the open-source, cloud-native project, Spiffe, which is
managed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)
The project is designed to provide identity and access management for application-to-application communication in an open-source
framework.The idea is that as companies transition to a containerized, cloud-native approach to application delivery, there needs to a
smooth automated way for applications and services to very quickly prove they are legitimate, in much the same way individuals provide a
username and password to access a website
This could be, for example, as applications pass through API gateways, or as automation drives the use of multiple applications in a
workflow.Webscale companies like Google and Netflix have developed mechanisms to make this work in-house, but it’s been out of reach of
most large enterprise companies
Scytale wants to bring to any company this capability to authenticate services and applications.In addition to the funding announcement, the
company announced Scytale Enterprise, a tool that provides a commercial layer on top of the open-source tools the company has developed
The enterprise version helps companies that might not have the personnel to deal with the open-source version on their own by providing
training, consulting and support services.Bain Capital Venture’s Enrique Salem sees a startup solving a big problem for companies that are
moving to cloud-native environments and need this kind of authentication
“In an increasingly complex and fragmented enterprise IT environment, Scytale has not only built Spiffe’s amazing open-source community
but has also delivered a commercial offering to address hybrid cloud authentication challenges faced by Fortune 500 identity and access
management engineering teams,” Salem said in a statement.Based in the Bay Area, Scytale launched in 2017 and currently has 24 employees.
