Britive
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Britive grabs $10M Series A to build automated multi-cloud permissions tool
Britive, an early-stage startup that is trying to bring privileged access control to a multi-cloud world, announced a $10 million Series A this morning. Crosslink Capital led the investment, with participation from previous investors Upfront Ventures and One Way Ventures.
The company helps automate permissioning across multiple cloud vendors and software services, whether that involves a human or a machine seeking permission. In a world of increasing automation, it’s often a machine seeking access, and that makes permissioning all the more critical, says Britive co-founder and CEO Art Poghosyan.
“What we offer is an automated approach to access, [moving from] what we call statically granted access, which constantly gets added all the time […] to completely ‘just in time access’,” he said. That means that after you define a policy, it sets the ground rules for access, and grants it based on that policy for the time required, and nothing more, whether you’re a human or a machine.
In today’s complex development, world that could take many forms, including API keys and secrets. “Yes, sometimes those things are granted to a human actor like a DevOps engineer, but a lot of times it also needs to be granted — quote, unquote — to a Terraform script or to GitHub to go and build out application infrastructure or deploy an application,” he said.
The company currently has 40 employees, a number that Poghosyan expects to double in the next 12 months as he puts this capital to work. As a first-generation Armenian immigrant, Poghosyan says that he takes diversity and inclusion extremely seriously as he hires more employees.
“We’ve always been committed — in this business and our previous startup — to providing equal opportunities to talented people, no matter what background they come from. I’m really proud that even as a small company — we’re 40 at the moment — we have more than 50% of our workforce which comes from ethnic minority groups,” he said.
Britive, which is based in Los Angeles, launched in 2018 and brought its first product to market in 2019. The company raised a $5.4 million seed round last July, which it announced in September, making the total raised so far approximately $15.4 million.
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Pitching access management on the fly, Los Angeles-based Britive raises $5.4 million
It seems Los Angeles is becoming an enterprise software hotspot.
LA saw its first big enterprise exit in recent memory with the recent acquisition of Signal Sciences for $775 million, and less than a month later a hometown startup, Britive has raised $5.4 million from LA’s own venture fund, Upfront Ventures and a clutch of security experts.
For chief executive Artyom Poghosyan and chief technology officer Alex Gudanis, Britive is simply the latest initiative in a decades-long effort to reshape security technology.
Both Poghosyan and Gudanis have long histories in identity and access management; back in 2009 Poghosyan founded Advancive Technology Solutions, which was acquired by Optiv in 2015 to bulk up its identity access management service.
Now, he and Gudanis are trying to solve the issues of identity access management that the new, ubiquitous cloud computing model presents for security officers and developers.
“When Optiv acquired us, we were already seeing interesting and strong signals in the technolog space about the disruption that was being driven by cloud technologies,” said Poghosyan.
Those cloud technologies presented new challenges for the kind of privileged access management technologies that Poghosyan had developed.
The solution that Britive pitches is a dynamic model for granting permissions for access, Poghosyan said. Instead of granting permanent access, there are policy-based pre-authorizations that a company can set up defined for specific tasks and roles.
Based on a developer’s role and work, they can request and receive access automatically based on the specific parameters defined by a company or security officer.
The company already has more than a dozen customers using its technology after launching merely two years ago. It’s a customer base that includes one of the world’s largest carmakers and a global clothing brand — companies Poghosyan declined to identify, citing contractual obligations.
The company charges based on the number of users who are requesting permission for access, Poghosyan said.
As more companies move to remote work in the COVID-19 era and distributed teams become the norm, streamlining the provisioning and access management process for companies is going to become even more important.
Undoubtedly, that’s why Britive was able to land investors like Upfront Ventures and why their partner, Kara Nortman, is joining the company’s board of directors. It’s also the reason the company was able to attract some of LA’s leading enterprise executives to back the company, including Andrew Peterson, CEO of Signal Sciences and Dave Cole, CEO of Open Raven.
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