Scytale, a San Francisco-based company that is a founding contributor to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) SPIFFE and SPIRE projects, has raised $5 million in funding from new investors Bain Capital Ventures, TechOperators, and Work-Bench. Existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in this round. Scytale plans to use the funding to launch its commercial offering based on its popular open source projects.
“Scytale and the SPIFFE community believe that adopting a consistent identity model for software services is a critical capability that enables enterprises to more quickly evolve to hybrid cloud models and deliver greater value to its customers faster,” said Scytale chief executive Sunil James in a statement. “We are looking forward to bringing to market a foundational capability that will also help enterprise security and infrastructure teams standardize and accelerate services authentication across any platform, putting them on a great path towards developing zero trust security infrastructure.”
Another announcement made by Scytale is the availability of Scytale Enterprise, which is an industry-first service identity management for the cloud-native enterprise. And Scytale Enterprise enables frictionless service authentication across cloud, container, and on-premise platforms.
“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,” added Bain Capital Ventures partner Enrique Salem. “Scytale enables enterprises to more easily accelerate cloud adoption and reduce development efforts while also standardizing and automating service authentication. We are excited by Scytale’s growing traction and huge potential to unlock innovation and efficiency for large-scale distributed software systems at major companies.”
Scytale was founded in 2017 by engineers with experience at Amazon Web Services, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Duo Security. Andrew Jessup (VP of product management) and Emiliano Berenbaum (CTO) are also founders at Scytale.
“From our experiences not only as investors but also as technologists within some of the world’s largest financial institutions, we have heard repeatedly from enterprise CIOs and CISOs that while dynamic computing capabilities like public cloud, containers, and microservices offer the promise of speed and agility, regulatory-driven risk policies and controls, such as those that identify and authenticate services, are difficult to evolve or change,” explained Work-Bench general partner Jonathan Lehr. “We’re excited by SPIFFE’s promise of delivering a flexible, backward-compatible mechanism to uniformly identify software services within and across an enterprise. This will enable Scytale customers to easily extend their existing, hardened, authentication controls to any dynamic platform that they adopt.”
