Highlights:

  • In 2021, Cerbos, which is officially known as Zenauth Ltd., raised USD 3.5 million.
  • Cerbos Cloud aims to minimize the manual labor needed to manage Cerbos deployments.

Recently, company Cerbos revealed that it had secured USD 7.5 million in seed funding for its open-source platform for controlling user access to applications.

Numerous angel investors joined OMERS Ventures in leading the round. In 2021, Cerbos, officially known as Zenauth Ltd., raised USD 3.5 million. The business from London stated that it would improve its technology using the money from its most recent investment.

The application determines the features users can access when they log in. For instance, a system administrator could need access to more functions than regular business users. Authorization is deciding how and with whom a particular area of an application’s interface can interact.

Cerbos offer the same-named open-source authorization platform. It enables programmers to use YAML, a relatively straightforward programming language, to create policies that specify who can access what application functionalities. Cerbos evaluates the YAML-based authorization policies set by developers when a user login into an application and grants feature access accordingly.

In the past, software development teams explicitly incorporated permission logic into the code files for their apps. In Cerbos’ opinion, that strategy can make software maintenance more difficult. The startup’s platform stores authorization policies separately, allowing developers to modify them as necessary without altering their applications’ fundamental code.

Emre Baran, Co-founder, and Chief Executive Officer, said, “Decoupling authorization makes life easier for both developers as well as product managers and security teams who create the requirements. Once implemented, the developers can focus on the rest of their job without having to deal with every change in access control logic.”

A Cerbos instance loads authorization policies into memory at startup to speed up processing. Keeping data in memory eliminates the need to retrieve it from storage, thereby accelerating the response time of an application. The company’s platform is “orders of magnitude” quicker than competing tools. According to the company, its platform is “orders of magnitude” faster than some competing tools.

The startup has a built-in auditing tool for debugging purposes. The tool logs every authorization request that Cerbos handles, along with the justification for whether it was approved or rejected. Programmers can use the logs to rectify potential application authorization policy problems.

The business claims that hundreds of companies use its platform to handle tens of millions of weekly authorization requests. It intends to generate revenue from the platform by offering a for-profit managed version called Cerbos Cloud. The startup recently announced the service in conjunction with a new funding round.

Cerbos Cloud aims to minimize the manual labor needed to manage Cerbos deployments. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool are included. The tool allows software teams to rapidly update the authorization policies of their Cerbos-powered applications, the startup claims.