Navigate back to Perspectives Navigate back to News

Otterize Launches Game-Changing Solution to Secure Service-to-Service Cloud Connectivity, Emerging from Stealth with $11.5M in Seed Funding

Copy of Otterize Team (1)

QUICK TAKE

  • Otterize is reinventing how services in the cloud are securely connected to each other and their infrastructures through its seamless open-source solution
  • The company’s automated ‘intent-based access control’ approach allows developers to easily create secure connections – solving a major pain point for dev teams across the world
  • It has announced $11.5M in seed funding led by Index Ventures and publicly unveiled its new Otterize Cloud product
  • Illustrating industry belief in Otterize, Angel investors include current and former CEOs, founders, CTOs and engineering/product leads from companies including Shopify, GitHub, Slack, Postman, Snyk, and VMware
  • Otterize was founded in 2022 by Tomer Greenwald, Uri Sarid, and Ori Shoshan

INDEX PERSPECTIVE

“Otterize’s vision is truly transformative for developers”

By Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, Partner

Building secure connections is one of the last big, time-consuming challenges developers face when working in the cloud. Currently, there are no good choices or easy solutions: developers must either teach everyone using each new system they build to connect securely, tackle every new connection needed manually, or simply choose to not establish secure connections at all.

By automatically configuring existing security to create a completely new way of connecting services to both each other and infrastructure, Otterize’s seamless solution doesn't just remove a bit of the friction faced by engineers connecting multiple services, but completely eliminates it. Otterize’s vision is a true game changer for developers: it’s made for those that are in the trenches, both the developers building software, and the platform engineers and DevOps wizards who pave the roads for those developers.

Having spent years running my own product teams, I know that this is an issue that every single company using different services in the cloud needs to address. Otterize’s solution is not only extremely elegant, but totally original and unique – and set to be a godsend for cloud dev teams across the world.

THE DETAILS

Otterize is solving one of the biggest remaining issues in cloud security at a time when a growing distributed workforce demands more self-serve solutions – particularly those that allow rapid development without coordinating between client and server teams.

Its unique ‘intent-based access control’ (IBAC) approach automatically configures existing security controls, enabling developers to easily connect their services to each other and infrastructure securely. Developers get secure access to services by simply declaring, alongside their code, what calls the code intends to make. Otterize then automatically configures existing access controls to allow those calls and block any unintended calls.

Platform engineers can embed the Otterize open source solution in their development pipeline, as well as plug in insights from the Otterize Cloud via its API, which offers a visual ‘access graph’ ​​to help gradually and safely roll out IBAC access.

This all means developers can focus on what their code needs to call, rather than how to make those calls securely – providing a fundamentally easier and self-serve way to access services and infrastructure safely. This results in not only less friction for developers, but no dangling permissions, no unexpected outages from loss of access, and a steady march towards establishing a zero trust security model.

“The motivation for starting Otterize wasn’t to provide yet another policy engine, an easier configuration UI, or another dashboard,” said Tomer Greenwald, Otterize CEO. “It was to completely rethink how service-to-service access can be made both effortless and secure, enabling developers to focus on writing code rather than on configuring server permissions. And if possible, do it without introducing any new authorization components. I’m excited to see that vision now becomes a reality, with a new approach – intent-based access control (IBAC) – and a product you can deploy in minutes.”

Today’s $11.5M seed funding round was led by Index Ventures, followed by Dig Ventures and Vine Ventures, with participation by Jibe Ventures, Crew Capital, and Operator Partners. Further illustrating wide industry belief in Otterize and excitement for its solutions, an impressive set of Angels are also backing the company.

Among them is Guy Podjarny, co-founder and President of Snyk. “What I’m most excited about is the IBAC approach which Otterize is pioneering,” he explained. “It’s a bold approach to rebuilding how authorization is done in a way that works for teams who build software, not just for those who oversee security. By flipping the conventional paradigm of server-side access controls to be based on client intents to call the server, Otterize makes life fundamentally better for developers, which drives adoption, which ends up with the security posture organizations have yearned for.”

Further notable angel investors include: Abhinav Asthana, CEO of Postman; Adrian Ludwig, Chief Trust Officer at Atlassian; Akhil Paul, Investor at Caparo Group; Caleb Sima, former CSO at Robinhood; Dion Almaer, VP Engineering at Shopify; Guy Podjarny, Co-Founder of Snyk; Greg Schott, former CEO of MuleSoft; Ken Fox, Founder of Stripes; Mahau Ma, former SVP Corporate Strategy at MuleSoft; Michael Shaulov, CEO of Fireblocks; Nadir Izrael, CTO of Armis; Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub; Peter McKay, CEO of Snyk; Sanjay Poonen, former COO of VMware; Tamar Yehoshua, former CPO of Slack; Yevgeny Dibrov, CEO of Armis; Yvonne Wassenaar, former CEO of Puppet.

In this post: Otterize, Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas

Published — April 13, 2023