Abbey Labs – an innovator in identity and access management (IAM) – recently announced that it raised a $5.25 million seed round to help companies secure and automate employee access to sensitive data infrastructure. This seed funding round was led by Point72 Ventures with participation from Haystack, Essence Ventures, and angels across the security, infrastructure, and data verticals like Emilio Escobar (CISO of Datadog), Harold Gimenez (SVP of Engineering at Hashicorp), and Pete Soderling (Founder of Data Council).
Launched by CEO Arvil Nagpal and CTO Jeff Chao, former employees of Okta and Stripe, respectively, Abbey Labs is building on the founders’ deep experience at the intersection of identity and data infrastructure. Nagpal and Chao created Abbey Labs with a shared vision: Enabling engineers to build secure infrastructure from the start by defining access to follow a principle of least privilege and ensuring only strictly necessary access is granted. By offering tools for engineers that integrate well with what they already use, Abbey Labs allows them to increase the scope of their automation.
Abbey Labs addresses an enterprise need that isn’t currently being met: The ability to streamline and make the process by which a user has access to internal data infrastructure more efficient. This process has historically been complex, manual, and slow. Employees requesting proper access to do their jobs deal with inefficient, insecure, and costly process layers. Even though these processes aim to make companies secure and compliant, they create bottlenecks and take away valuable work time.
Abbey Labs is taking a revolutionary approach by introducing the first access governance platform built for engineers. And Abbey Labs integrates common access workflows, such as requests and approvals, into a company’s existing developer tooling and infrastructure. Rather than deploying a friction-laden solution on top of your software, Abbey Labs integrates directly into an organization’s infrastructure provisioning process, helping to give their engineers the right tools to automate access and build infrastructure securely from the start.
The new funding round will accelerate the company’s go-to-market opportunities, hiring, and developer awareness.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’ve seen this time and time again with breaches at Reddit, Riot Games, and Uber. The paradox is that employees are both a company’s most valuable asset and its weakest link – with sophisticated phishing attempts continuing to succeed.”
— Jeff Chao
“During my time at Okta, I saw first-hand the struggles our customers faced with providing engineers access to critical data systems in a way that’s both secure and compliant. We built Abbey Labs to allow companies to better control access to data systems in partnership with their engineers, not against them.”
— Arvil Nagpal
“Our work in security continually points to a need for more engineering-centric approaches, and we believe that the Abbey Labs team brings deep domain expertise to the table to execute on this in the Access Governance space.”
— Noah Carr, Partner at Point72 Ventures
