Scytale grabs $5M Series A for application-to-application identity management

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 in 2018. 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.