SGNL.ai, an enterprise licensing software company, announced today that it has raised $12 million in seed funding led by Costanoa Ventures with participation from Faka Ventures, Moonshots Capital and Resolute Ventures. According to CEO Scott Kreis, the proceeds will be used to develop the company’s core products and hire the first team, as well as work with design partners to refine the SGNL solution.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Crease asserted that licensing is becoming a management concern at all levels. He is not wrong. According to Gartner, organizations that run cloud infrastructure services will violate at least 2,300 privilege-to-privilege policies — that is, when a user is given more privileges than necessary to do the job — each year by 2024. Meanwhile, the average global cost of a data breach will reach a record $4.24 million in 2021, IBM recently reported, up 10 percent from 2019, as more people shift to remote work.
Before conceiving SGNL in 2011, Eric Gustavsson, the second founder of Criz and SGNL, They have spent almost a decade developing identity solutions at Bitium, which they started together in 2011. After Google acquired Bitumen in 2017, Gustavsson joined the tech giant as an engineering manager for G Suite (now Google Workspace), the “next generation” of identity access management. Chris spent several years at Google on the Product, Identity and Licensing team.
“From our point of view working in many identity-focused areas at Google, it was clear to Gustavson and I that few companies could solve enterprise licensing at scale,” Kreis said. Seeing a critical need to help companies keep user and customer data secure, we founded SGNL in 2021 to address the issue. We quickly attracted a core group of identity industry professionals eager to push the boundaries of what’s possible in enterprise licensing.
SGNL aims to provide company employees with “just-in-time” access to corporate information based on business context, such as business needs or verifications. Rather than relying on relatively static roles or features, the startup platform only provides software resources and information when the user needs them.
A look at the SGNL.ai dashboard, which allows managers to review permissions across teams, departments and individual employees. Image Credits: SGNL
Beyond this, SGNL also attempts to unify existing systems cross-regionally, such as corporate directories, HR directories, customer relationship management platforms and ticketing systems, building workforce and customer data graphs used to define flexible access rights. Access can be audited in real-time, making it easy for administrators to generate compliance reports and analyze historical permissions.
“The pandemic and the broader shift in work patterns – hybrid, remote work, extended workforces, etc. – make the issue of permission and access management even more urgent for the organization. The modern workforce is no longer operating from within the corporate firewall using only applications that run internally, Crease added. “This creates the perfect conditions for bad actors to use very broad ambient access rights to attack the enterprise… SGNL’s platform maintains a blast radius by reducing ambient access and capturing sensitive information in a timely manner.”
Crease declined to disclose SGNL’s customer base or the company’s revenue. But in the last few years, when new obstacles were created in the security situation of the organization, he pointed out that identity management was able to attract a lot of investment. According to Crunchbase, $3.2 billion will be invested in the venture capital space in 2021, which is 2.5 times the investment volume of 2020’s $1.3 billion, which was already a record.
SGNL’s test draws customers from rival vendors such as Opal, whose software automatically discovers databases, servers, internal devices and applications to forward access requests to employees. ConductorOne, another identity and access management automation platform, recently made a $15 million investment. Identity and access management software provider ForgeRock filed for an IPO last September after raising more than $700 million in VC cash.
But the current technology slowdown is sure to be a tailwind for SGNL, Crease said, as companies push to buy solutions instead of building them in-house. To his point, there is some evidence that IT teams are overwhelmed with tasks related to managing identity and access. For example, in a 2020 poll conducted by 1Password, IT staff responded that they spent a month’s work — 21 days — resetting passwords and tracking app usage.
“The number and cost of data breaches is only increasing…SGNL is well-positioned for the shift in most enterprise organizations to increase security, ensure compliance and reduce costs,” Crease said.
Palo Alto SGNL, which currently has 28 employees, expects to hire seven more by the end of the year.
