Abbey Labs, an innovator in identity and access management (IAM), today announced that it raised a $5.25 million seed round to help companies secure and automate employee access to sensitive data infrastructure. The seed round was led by Point72 Ventures with participation from Haystack, Essence Ventures, and angels across the security, infrastructure, and data verticals, including Emilio Escobar (CISO of Datadog), Harold Gimenez (SVP of Engineering at Hashicorp), and Pete Soderling (Founder of Data Council).

Founded by CEO Arvil Nagpal and CTO Jeff Chao, former employees of Okta and Stripe, respectively, Abbey Labs is building on the founders’ deep experience at the intersection of identity and data infrastructure.

Nagpal and Chao created Abbey Labs with a shared vision: Allow engineers to build secure infrastructure from the start by defining access to follow a principle of least privilege and ensure only strictly necessary access is granted. By developing tools for engineers that integrate well with what they already use, Abbey Labs allows them to increase the scope of their automation.

Abbey Labs is addressing an enterprise need that isn’t currently being met: The ability to streamline and make more efficient the process by which a user has access to internal data infrastructure. This process has historically been complex, manual and slow. Employees requesting proper access to do their jobs battle inefficient, insecure and costly layers of process. While these processes aim to make companies secure and compliant, they also create bottlenecks and take away valuable work time.

“We built Abbey Labs to allow companies to better control access to data systems in partnership with their engineers, not against them.”

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Even today, many IT teams implement identity governance solutions that are challenging to deploy and introduce friction for employees, especially engineers, who need access to data systems quickly and efficiently. This tension between employees and poorly implemented software leads to significant security risks.

As Chao points out, “We’ve seen this time and time again with breaches at Reddit, Riot Games, and Uber. The paradox is that employees are both a company’s most valuable asset and its weakest link – with sophisticated phishing attempts continuing to succeed.”

“During my time at Okta, I saw first-hand the struggles our customers faced with providing engineers access to critical data systems in a way that’s both secure and compliant,” Nagpal said. “We built Abbey Labs to allow companies to better control access to data systems in partnership with their engineers, not against them.”

Abbey Labs is taking a revolutionary approach, introducing the first access governance platform built for engineers. Abbey Labs integrates common access workflows, such as requests and approvals, into a company’s existing developer tooling and infrastructure. Instead of deploying a friction-laden solution on top of your software, Abbey Labs integrates directly into an organization’s infrastructure provisioning process, helping to give their engineers the right tools to automate access and build infrastructure securely from the start.

“Our work in security continually points to a need for more engineering-centric approaches, and we believe that the Abbey Labs team brings deep domain expertise to the table to execute on this in the Access Governance space,” says Noah Carr, Partner at Point72 Ventures.

The new round of funding will accelerate the company’s go-to-market opportunities, hiring and developer awareness.

August is already shaping up to be a busy month for the team at Abbey Labs, as it will soon announce its public beta release in conjunction with three major conferences they will be attending: Black Hat, DEF CON and BSidesLV 2023.

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