BastionZero raises $6 million to enhance its zero-trust remote access solution
BastionZero announced it has raised a $6m seed round, led by Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Akamai, DG Lab Fund (Japan).
BastionZero is a cloud service that controls remote access to the infrastructure targets that backend and cloud engineering teams use to build and host their software services (e.g. servers, Kubernetes clusters, databases, internal web applications).
The company was founded by Sharon Goldberg, PhD. and Ethan Heilman, PhD, who met while they were infrastructure and cryptography researchers at Boston University. The founders saw an opportunity to modernize remote access by embracing cryptographic techniques that rely on multiple roots of trust. These techniques allow BastionZero to offer security-critical remote access functionalities in an easy-to-use cloud service, without the risk that a compromise of the cloud service leads to a compromise of their customer’s infrastructure.
The company’s Seed funding will allow it to continue building the features of BastionZero, and devise new ways to ease and automate the rollout of the tool across cloud teams and different types of infrastructure targets. This new investment will also accelerate the timeline in opening the doors to everyone under a self-serve model.
CEO Sharon Goldberg says: “Every cloud development team needs some way to access their infrastructure, in a scalable and secure manner. And usually, they’ve built up some kind of system themselves, which comes with high security risks and bothersome operational costs. What we’ve built at BastionZero is a cloud service that simplifies zero-trust access to infrastructure, using a modern security architecture approach based on multiple roots of trust. We believe that we’re part of a new security product category that will displace VPNs, bastion hosts, and privilege access management (PAM) tools.”
According to Deepak Jeevankumar, of Dell Technologies Capital, “VPN based access for (cloud) dev/devops environments does not scale well and is not agile for the modern developer and cloud ops leaders. Today they are forced to maintain different systems for all of their targets in all of their cloud and datacenter environments. BastionZero is a drop-in replacement for all of those systems, and with a more robust and agile security model than anything that is currently on the market. It’s the future of remote access for developers and cloud ops.