Passbolt secures $8m Series A to enhance password collaboration

By Gloria Methri

Passbolt has raised $8 million in Series A financing for its all-in-one open source-based collaborative password and access software. The company, founded in December 2016, raised pre-seed funding of $620,000 in December 2018, followed by $3.1 million in seed funding that closed in January 2021.

The Series A round was led by new investor Airbridge Equity Partners (Netherlands). Existing investors that include Expon Capital’s Digital Tech Fund, ScaleFund, Seeder, Dedicated, Bondi Capital, Carricha Capital, and LBAN also participated, along with industry veterans such as Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excellium Services) and Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg).

“Organisations are trapped between consumer-focused password managers and complex monolithic enterprise solutions that don’t meet the need for secure collaboration of agile teams operating in digital environments,” said Kevin Muller, co-founder and CEO of Passbolt. “We’re building a new type of credential and access manager for organisations of all sizes. It enables technical teams to collaboratively manage access to the organisation’s IT, software development, and security infrastructure. At the same time, it allows the broader workforce to log into productivity tools automatically and to share access credentials with colleagues securely.”

The funding will be used to accelerate product development and meet complex security and regulatory requirements, with the first milestone being the next major release, Passbolt 5.0. That will extend capabilities for the more than 400,000 daily active users globally. It will also enable scaling international sales and marketing to support global operations and customer success, having already onboarded more than 40,000 organisations and 2,000 paid customers worldwide.

Passbolt provides an application programming interface (API). This centric, versatile platform collaboratively manages and protects accounts, credentials and secrets used by both people (system administrators, broader workforce and others) as well as machines (systems or applications) across various devices. It supports not just passwords but all organisational credentials – from root accounts, SSH keys, API keys, non-human credentials or key-value secrets for infrastructure access to simple web logins and Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTPs), a standard method of two-factor authentication (2FA) or multi-factor authentication (MFA).