Marries Delightful Experience with Modern Access Controls for Every Enterprise

strongDM, the infrastructure access platform, announced it closed a $54 million Series B funding round led by Tiger Global, with participation from new investor GV, and existing investors Sequoia Capital, True Ventures, HearstLab, Bloomberg Beta, and Godfrey Sullivan. strongDM is an enterprise-grade platform that delivers the secure infrastructure access controls businesses require, while simultaneously providing end users with a product they love to use. It works with every infrastructure environment, legacy or multi-cloud.

The adoption of cloud, democratization of access, and the “right tool for the right job” pushed the complexity of infrastructure access management beyond human scale. DevOps teams are stressed with daily demands of scaling processes, not to mention keeping security requirements in mind. Point solutions exist to cover individual protocols, but these only exacerbate the problem: infrastructure access management was never designed for today’s evolving, heterogeneous environments.

strongDM combines authentication, authorization, networking, and observability into one platform. It works with all resources past, present, and future, while providing a delightful user experience to administrators and end users alike. The result is that DevOps teams can securely deliver infrastructure access at scale while embracing modern security and compliance requirements.

“Enterprises have already modernized their infrastructure or are in the throes of transformation.  The complexity of today’s reality requires DevOps teams to juggle security and access, typically competing priorities. But the developer experience has historically been ignored, which is why security products end up as shelfware”, said Elizabeth Zalman, Co-founder and CEO, strongDM. “This investment from Tiger Global, GV, and existing investors is validation of our vision to deliver infrastructure access that is easy, secure, and works for every environment and enterprise.”

strongDM provides the following benefits:

• Efficiently implement least-privilege and role-based access controls at scale
• Automate workflows for technical staff which increases productivity
• Enable DevOps to treat access “as code”, just like infrastructure
• Ensure that access is locked down from instance spin up to tear down
• Audit readiness out-of-the-box with strongDM’s net new audit log, created by the only protocol-aware proxy
• Easily deploy and scale infrastructure access controls across any diverse, hybrid, physical, or multi-cloud environment

“The infrastructure needed to support Squarespace’s global customer base is sophisticated. It often requires our engineers to access various internal resources around the clock,” said John Colton, SVP of Engineering at Squarespace. “We looked at privileged access management (PAM) solutions, but needed one that worked for all our teams—SRE, Security and Compliance. With strongDM, we get a user experience that the technical staff enjoys and security controls that meet our business requirements.”

“Healthcare is one of the most regulated industries still powered by an assortment of different legacy technologies.  Enterprises have historically used hardware appliances and VPNs to ensure compliance with industry standards. But that just doesn’t scale for the needs of today’s modern companies, and certainly not this one”, said Vivek Desai, SVP Engineering at Olive. “strongDM replaces point products and manual processes with automation and a phenomenal security posture. I can go with my head high to any healthcare organization in America and tell them the data layer security is on par with, and above, most regulatory requirements.”

“The cloud exposed a significant gap in how every business manages and secures their critical backend infrastructure.  The IAM and PAM markets do not address the complexity and scale of the problem, nor do I see that in their future.  Companies can’t just bolt on a developer and DevOps-first experience; it must be designed that way from Day One”, said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global.  “Furthermore, the current security climate has shown that this must be solved in every industry.  We backed strongDM because they’ve seamlessly solved a massive enterprise problem with consumer-like usability.”

“strongDM solves a number of problems for modern, remote-oriented developer teams by managing access to every piece of cloud infrastructure while still ensuring the highest grade of security. As a developer, I was impressed with how seamlessly strongDM allows technical staff to be productive and how much their customers love using the service. We’re looking forward to working with the team as they create a new standard for infrastructure access management,” said Erik Nordlander, General Partner at GV.