From Seed Stage to Series A Funding
Today’s a big day for the Britive team. We just announced this morning that we’ve raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Crosslink Capital with participation from seed round investors Upfront Ventures and One Way Ventures. Graduating from seed stage to a Series A funding round is regarded as a major step for any startup, and we feel that securing the backing of such an esteemed group of investors is a firm validation of our product vision and the work we’ve done since launching in 2018.
When my cofounders Alex, Sameer and I first started Britive, we set out to challenge the inertia we were seeing in the identity and security space, which was slow in understanding the unique risks presented by the new multi-cloud environments of today’s enterprises. We just didn’t see traditional model of perpetual standing privileges common in on-premises development scenarios as sustainable in cloud environments. Perimeter defenses are of little use in a perimeter-less cloud environment, so it logically followed that digital identity would become the new essential line of defense for securing users, data, development tools, and resources.
Just-in-Time Permissioning for the Multi-Cloud Enterprise
We believe the market opportunity for ephemeral just-in-time (JIT) permissions and secrets for multi-cloud enterprises is enormous and growing. Our initial work to put forth a platform based on JIT permissions and zero-standing access has been well received in the marketplace and within the analyst community. What we’ve accomplished to date has opened a lot of eyes and a lot of doors for us, but we’ve just started scratching the surface of delivering a comprehensive security solution for the emerging field of supporting DevSecOps best practices. Which is a long way of saying that Britive is in this for the long term, and we fully expect to play a central role in the future of cloud IT security in the era of the perimeter-less enterprise.
Of course, the bad guys could see these trends toward the perimeter-less enterprise also, and accordingly have been focusing malicious attacks on privileged access and secrets management infrastructure as never before. Gartner now sees security failures involving privileged identities rising to 75 percent of all failures in 2023, up from 50 percent in 2020. We feel that Britive is bringing the right solutions to the table at exactly the right time for the enormous number of organizations who are embracing multi-cloud architectures, especially those enterprises taking advantage of DevOps and continuous integration, continuous delivery pipelines. The DevSecOps challenge is real, but as we’re proving with our growing customer base, it can be addressed and solved in ways that don’t slow or impact CI/CD processes. With the backing of our new investors, Britive now has the resources and access to a larger network of supporters that will allow us to begin broadening our efforts on multiple fronts.
Product Development & Engineering
Over the past year we’ve been hard at work on several new product features that have been in development with guidance from several customers. We’ll be adding product and engineering headcount that will enable us to accelerate this work and bring new offerings to market on more ambitious timelines.
Go to Market
We’re proud to have built a number of customer relationships in our first few years—one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers, top brand retailers, and other recognizable names from the Fortune 500. The name of the game in enterprise sales, however, is outreach at scale. Toward that end, we’ll be building out all aspects of our sales and marketing processes with an emphasis on putting in place the tools and technologies that will enable us to rapidly scale our demand generation programs.
Partnerships & the Channel
Again, we’ve been fortunate in having forged close relationships with some of the most important players in the identity and security space, including Okta, Ping, Optiv, HashiCorp, CrowdStrike and many others. We see building up a strong, reliable channel as crucial to ongoing sales success. But just as important, we see a big opportunity in aligning our solutions with technology platforms such as AWS, Snowflake, Google Cloud and others—so these kinds of product partnerships will also be a focus moving forward.
Customer Success
As we grow, so grows the importance of getting customers onboarded and realizing value from our solutions as quickly as possible. When you’re a startup, every sale is an all-hands-on-deck event, which is great for team building and understanding specific customer pain points. To scale, however, you need a team of knowledgeable specialists that can take over new accounts from sales to get customers up and running fast. This Series A funding round will make it possible for us to follow through on our commitment to evolving our processes toward a first-rate enterprise customer experience.
Onward
Finally, a few thoughts on our new investors and the positive intangibles they bring to the table. Crosslink Venture’s record of success in the IT security space is well known and a big reason we’re working with them. Something perhaps not as well understood is that Crosslink maintains a program, or platform really, called Alpha that helps founders like Alex and me network with other founders, CEOs and leading technology influencers. The idea is simple: to create an environment where leaders in technology can connect and collaborate with their peers in a private setting where they can speak candidly.
Building relations with industry peers and potential customers or partners is important for any business, but for Britive, it’s crucial. We’ve deliberately dedicated ourselves to a product development strategy that is cloud-native and enterprise-first. Meaning, the Britive platform is specifically designed to address the access permissioning and secrets management challenges faced by very large organizations. Having access to the practitioners that are also working on these issues on a daily basis means our product development efforts will be better-informed and more attuned to market need than ever before.
One parting thought on the Britive team
This Series A funding is enabling us to significantly expand headcount, and we’re dedicated to continuing to build out our already diverse team. To our customers and investors: thank you! Know that the Britive team is rolling up our collective sleeves right now to prove that you made a wise choice to invest in our future. To my teammates let’s do this!
