Scytale Raises $3 Million in Seed Funding
Helping Fortune 500 enterprises use SPIFFE to securely and easily build identity-driven, large-scale distributed software systems.
On behalf of my amazing team, I’m proud to share with you that Scytale Inc., one of SPIFFE’s maintainers, has raised $3M in seed funding! Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with Bob Goodman joining the company’s board of directors.
In 2017, we brought together seasoned engineers and product managers from Amazon Web Services, Cisco Systems, Duo Security, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Splunk. We started spending time with our Fortune 500 customers and noticed they were increasingly adopting technologies that enable elastic scheduling of IT infrastructure. They hoped this would enable them to deliver increasing value more quickly to their businesses, similar to what they observed from organizations like Google, Square, Twitter, and more.
These technologies are great building blocks, but they’re not silver bullets. They challenge our customers’ distributed software, operations, and security engineering teams to more effectively build, operate, and secure increasingly complex and fragmented enterprise IT environments.
Scytale believes identity is an important building block in addressing these challenges. That’s why our first step was to help launch SPIFFE, an industry-developed set of specifications that defines identity semantics for software “workloads.” Our second step was to help launch SPIRE, an open-source project that issues, manages, and authenticates SPIFFE identities. When deployed as part of a shared services platform, SPIRE delivers a flexible yet consistent mechanism to authenticate workloads, regardless of where they run.
Our third step is to deliver a set of well-integrated software solutions to our Fortune 500 customers that ensures their disparate software systems — even those spanning heterogeneous IT environments and platforms — can communicate with each other securely and easily.
While we’re not quite ready to share more details on this third step yet, we have shared our plan with Bob. Here’s what he said to me after our first board meeting last year:
The scale of your team’s vision is a throwback to my early investing days. Ambitious is an understatement, but that’s exactly what BVP expects of its entrepreneurs. This is a great example of what happens when you bring together an experienced team who not only have scars dealing with our customers’ problems, but also have attention to detail and user empathy. This is rare.
So far, our blog has provided a glimpse into some of Scytale’s SPIFFE-related work (btw, big congrats to the community for SPIFFE being accepted into the CNCF!). Over the coming months, expect to see from us greater investments in the SPIFFE community as well as more details about how we’ll help our customers. If you’re interested in coming along for the ride, check out our open opportunities.
