American VC invests $2.5M in Swiss cybersecurity startup

Developers often spend countless hours creating, configuring and operating complex authentication and authorisation systems. ZITADEL, built mainly in the Go programming language, solves these problems with easy-to-use integrations in multiple languages and frameworks. Through their solution, ZITADEL aims to create a streamlined, cloud-native identity management platform to speed time-to-market for software projects. 

Focused on the simplicity of integration, ready-to-use self-service features, a customisable and secure login with first-class support for passwordless authentication, and an API-first strategy, ZITADEL’s platform offers developers unprecedented flexibility, thus increasing productivity. In addition, ZITADEL’s capabilities address existing open-source projects which were not built for a cloud-native and serverless environment.  The current market landscape comprises established but closed-source players, including Auth0, Okta, Firebase, AWS Cognito, and others. 

A broad user base and paying customers
The startup launched the platform's first version in May 2021, with over 7 million monthly requests. “Every minute someone logs into an application with ZITADEL”, says Maximilian Panne, the startup’s Chief Operating Officer. The platform is open source, and ZITADEL has recorded over 600 sign-ups, over 1’000 developers have followed the startup on its Github repository, and around 70 active users in the public community (Discord). Additionally,  ZITADEL serves approximately 20 paying customers, mainly in the US, Switzerland, UK, and Australia. The startup generates revenues from subscriptions for the cloud SaaS platform and technical support contracts with SMEs/Enterprises that self-host ZITADEL.

The fresh capital from Nexus Venture Partners will support the startup's further developments, including accelerating the launch of the platform's second version, which is planned for the end of this month. New capabilities will include multi-tenancy, unlimited audit trails, improved ability to self-host, and support for serverless deployments, plus the potential to extend ZITADEL’s breadth with custom code created in WebAssembly. Combined with its cloud-native architecture, ZITADEL’s self-hosting capabilities allow privacy-focused customers to own and control their data by running a dedicated version. 

“We’re delighted to break new ground partnering with Florian and the ZITADEL team, our first-ever investment in a Swiss company. We believe the future of digital identities is passwordless. ZITADEL takes a developer-first, open-source approach to solving identity management. Its simple and easy-to-integrate building blocks help developers build secure authentication into their applications without requiring deep in-house expertise and resource commitment.” said Abhishek Sharma, Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners. “ZITADEL is the latest addition to the Nexus family of over a dozen marquee commercial open-source companies,” added Sharma.

(Press release/RAN)