●      Founded by Emre Baran, an ex-Googler, serial entrepreneur, and co-founder of Yonja and Qubit; and Charith Ellawala, a seasoned software engineer who spent many years at Ocado, Elastic and Qubit. Baran and Ellawala spotted a way to solve the rapidly growing cost burden for software companies.

●      Cerbos helps software companies, and organisations that build or use a wide-ranging software stack, to streamline user permissions.

●      The fundraise will help build out the Cerbos team and plot a path to international expansion.

Cerbos, a new open source software startup helping tech scaleups and other companies manage user permissions more efficiently, announced today that it has raised a $3.5 million seed round.

Investment in the funding round was led by Crane with support from Earlybird Digital East, Seedcamp, 8-Bit Capital, Connect Ventures, OSS Capital, Acequia Capital, HelloWorld, Tiny, and a roster of prestigious angel investors including Guillaume Pousaz, Paul Forster, Mike Stoppelman, Jeff Trudeau, Chris Barchak, and Pete Koomen.

Cerbos serves a vast addressable global market of companies with growing software stacks and exponentially more complex levels of user permissions to manage them.

In particular, as software companies gain more users, the issue of user permissions becomes increasingly, and often critically, important. It is at this stage that the need for Cerbos’ service becomes apparent. Cerbos works with companies that are building software, such as high-growth technology companies, software agencies, and large enterprises. When these companies build enterprise software they typically have to support multiple users in multiple roles. In order to be able to manage workflows, they must implement a piece of infrastructure that controls who can do what. The software needs to know what each user can and can’t do.

Cerbos helps streamline how these companies manage user permissions, largely needed by developers and software engineers, as well as compliance officers, product managers as well as chief information and security officers.

The London-based company, which was founded in 2021 by Emre Baran and Charith Ellawala, helps customers save time and money as well as solve the growing access control compliance needs from regulation such as GDPR, SOC2, and ISO-27001.

Emre Baran, founder and CEO of Cerbos, commented, “Cerbos helps rapidly growing companies, particularly scale-ups, go to market quickly by cutting time and saving money when building their software. For too long, engineers have been reinventing the wheel. Every time a team invests in a new piece of software, engineers have to reinvent the user permissions from scratch.”

“This is particularly true in large enterprises, where different departments or teams need to use the same software platform for distinctly different functions. It is a time-consuming and cost-inefficient way of working. We’re enabling companies to be more compliant and making higher quality security available to every developer. We make it zero hassle to get up and running.”

Cerbos’ approach is open source, language-agnostic, and enables users to pay as they grow.

Scott Sage, Co-founder and Partner of Crane Venture Partners, “It is well understood that user permission requirements get more complex as enterprise clients get bigger, and serve users in different roles, with a complex number of permission exceptions. To save companies from building this from scratch, Cerbos’ open-source approach radically simplifies user and role permissions by abstracting away the complexity. At Crane, we've been blown away by how much value their early users are already getting from the system.”