At this point, password managers became commonplace. But businesses often have different needs than consumers. Teams often have to share credentials to access resources, while IT and security teams need ways to control who has access to them. Passwordwho are announcing an $8 million seed on Thursday; We aim to become the de facto password manager for small and medium businesses with long-term goals of serving enterprise customers.
The Passbolt team is led by its French-born CEO. Kevin MullerHe argues that most organizations don't do well with consumer-oriented tools like Bitwarden or 1Password. “Look at Bitwarden, for example, or even 1Password, what they're doing is, on the one hand, they have a simple password manager for workers, and then they built a secret manager—or they bought a secret manager—for the DevOps teams, and then they built something else for authentication,” Muller said. It's so lonely.”
Muller previously founded e-learning platform Click on French and ran a web development consultancy in India. Passbolt was founded in 2017 with Remy Bertot and Cédric Alfonsi after a few years of previously modeling Open Source community publishing.
The service is based in part. KeePassA popular open source password manager; But as Muller emphasized, KeePass was never built for them. KeePass itself is already widely popular among tech groups, but it creates a single static file that securely stores credentials, he notes. It can be easily shared among team members, but there's no way to easily control who has access to it, and no way to access (or revoke) it, among other things.
“What we want is cooperation, security, and more control,” Muller said. “By control I mean: How do we put it behind our firewall on a server that we manage? How can we do that? How do we share passwords, secrets and all kinds of credentials in detail?”
Over the last few years, the team has developed native desktop apps; password expiration and rollovers; Added a tool to obtain two-factor authentication codes and role-based access controls for using Passbolt's own user interface. One of the more features on the horizon is support for managing keys.
In the long term, the Passbolt team wants to challenge enterprise-centric Privileged Access Management (PAM) services like CyberArk, Muller told me.
Today, Passbolt provides LDAP support in addition to a free community edition that users can self-host. single sign-on support; Activity Logs and LDAP Support Logs and Activity Logs; More. Like other open source projects, Passbolt starts at a hosting solution ($54 per month for 10 seats).
About 38,000 teams use the free version, with 2,000 paying for Passbolt's services. Most users (75%) choose self-hosting.
As Muller emphasizes, The code is regularly checked and Passbolt is SOC2 Type II certified.
Passbolt, which is based in Luxembourg and currently has around 30 employees, is set to become truly profitable in the summer of 2024. But the team is still determined to capitalize on the current growth and improve to keep up with the feature requests from its users.
The company's Series A round was led by the Netherlands-based company. Airbridge Equity Partners. Existing investors Expon Capital's Digital Technology fund Fund of scale, seed, Donate.Bondi Capital and Carricha Capital LBAN Angel investors like Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excellium Services) and Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg) also participated.
“Legacy managers like KeePass or Bitwarden and Privileged Access Management solutions like CyberArk are the norm in today's workplace. It's short for distributed and agile teams,” said Rick van Boekel, managing partner of Airbridge Equity Partners. “Passbolt's organic traction across a variety of industries validates the need for a more collaborative, enterprise-grade solution, and their impressive SaaS metrics prove that Passbolt users love the solution provided.”