AuthZed Raises $12 Million to Accelerate Permissions Systems in Series A Funding

AuthZed, the leader in managing permissions systems at scale, and developer of the popular open-source project SpiceDB, has announced the successful completion of a $12 million Series A funding round. This round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from returning investors Work-Bench and Amplify Partners.

NEW YORK – AuthZed, a startup helping enterprises rapidly build innovative user experiences with simple, fast, and secure permissions systems, announces it has closed $12 million in funding led by General Catalyst with continued participation from Work-Bench, Y Combinator, and Amplify Partners. The Series A capital brings AuthZed’s total amount raised to $15.8 million. The new funding will accelerate a strategic expansion for small–to mid-market-sized organizations, providing a fully managed and easy-to-deploy permissions system that is simple to maintain for their current and future authorization needs. This new offering will provide the same strong benefits of AuthZed’s private SaaS while providing a self-service model built on a shared infrastructure.

“Behind every digital interaction lies a permission: negotiating access decisions between entities. Federation is a fundamental part of what makes the internet an interesting place, and helping our customers’ end users securely share their most sensitive information with confidence and precision drives us forward.” Post this

The growing complexity of user interactions in modern applications strains traditional authorization approaches, leading to security vulnerabilities and bottlenecking development teams. With broken access control topping OWASP’s Top 10 list of web application security risks, AuthZed provides a universal, fast, scalable, and easy-to-use solution. AuthZed’s enterprise-ready permissions systems, built upon their open-source project SpiceDB, empower application teams to implement fine-grained access control, ensuring only authorized users can access specific data and features.

“Authorization stands as the bedrock of any application, and its complexity continues to grow alongside the evolution of software. Jake, Joey, and Jimmy have created what we believe is a powerful solution for permissions management that is evident in AuthZed’s growing enterprise customer base,” says Mark Crane, partner at General Catalyst.

Under the hood of AuthZed’s product lineup is the powerful project SpiceDB, developed by the AuthZed team. SpiceDB is the first open-source project to incorporate all three core design principles from Google’s Zanzibar paper: strong consistency, global replication, and a relationship-based permissions model. Since its debut in 2021, SpiceDB has consistently introduced new features to enhance the intuitiveness and broad applicability of permissions systems.

“This funding will help our team continue to support our customers to add meaningful user experiences to their products powered by our scalable and flexible permissions system architecture,” says Jake Moshenko, CEO at AuthZed. “Behind every digital interaction lies a permission: negotiating access decisions between entities. Federation is a fundamental part of what makes the internet an interesting place, and helping our customers’ end users securely share their most sensitive information with confidence and precision drives us forward.”

In 2023, AuthZed achieved 6x growth in ARR, underscoring its commitment to adaptability and comprehensive systems design tailored to meet evolving customer demands. The company serves a diverse clientele spanning healthcare, finance, and gaming, and it counts Canva, a global leader in online design and visual communication, among its esteemed partners. The company exemplifies a commitment to customer loyalty through in-depth collaborations with Turo, HackerRank, Clear Street, Evisort, SpotAI, and Avise.

“AuthZed has enabled Canva to centrally store and compute permissions at scale, across a diverse set of systems, saving a substantial amount of engineering time to focus on business needs,” says Simon Newton, Head of Platform at Canva.

About AuthZed

AuthZed, a leader in permissions systems as a service is on a mission to help every organization build fast and secure authorization that scales. As the creators of the open source project SpiceDB, AuthZed has established a scalable and consistent system for storing and computing permissions data—use it to build fine-grained authorization services. Authorization starts with AuthZed. Learn more at www.authzed.com or follow AuthZed on LinkedIn @authzed and X @AuthZed.

About General Catalyst

General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that invests in powerful, positive change that endures — for our entrepreneurs, our investors, our people, and society. We support founders with a long-term view who challenge the status quo, partnering with them from seed to growth stage and beyond to build companies that withstand the test of time. With offices in San Francisco, New York City, London, Berlin and Boston, the firm has helped support the growth of businesses such as: Airbnb, Deliveroo, Guild, Gusto, Hubspot, Illumio, Lemonade, Livongo, Oscar, Samsara, Snap, Stripe, and Warby Parker. For more: www.generalcatalyst.com.