Seattle-based Cloudentity secures $13 million Series A funding to secure and prevent attack on API-centric and cloud-native applications

As cloud technology matures, organizations began to move away from monolitic architecture, which is a set of tightly coupled processes that run as a single service, to a more robust architecture known as microservices. Unlike monolithic architecture, the distributed microservices architecture makes applications easier to scale and faster to develop, enabling innovation and accelerating time-to-market for new features.

However, as enterprises adopt microservices and API-first applications, they are faced with performance challenges and security risks to identity and authorization platforms that are required to safely deploy applications. Over the past years, API-centric automated attacks are on the rise. Enter Cloudentity, a Seattle, Washinton-based tech startup and provider of cloud-based application security and identity-aware authorization solutions.

Cloudentity solves these challenges by delivering a new category of identity-aware authorization for multi-cloud environments to enable a cloud-native approach to API Access Control. Cloudentity enables continuous contextual, fine-grained authorization with policy enforcement at the API and service level. This approach allows business’ development teams to adopt cloud constructs more quickly by externalizing identity and authorization.

Today, Cloudentity announced today that it has raised $13M in Series A funding to accelerate the company’s growth and go-to-market efforts. The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $15 million, was led by ForgePoint Capital, with participation from WestWave Capital. In conjunction with the funding, Cloudentity also announced that Sean Cunningham, Managing Director at ForgePoint Capital, will join its board of directors.

Founded in 2011 by Nathanael Coffing, Cloudentity is a provider of Identity-Aware Authorization and Application Security solutions for the API first economy such as Open Banking. API Access Control has emerged as the next generation of Identity security allowing enterprises to protect APIs, users, and services from misuse and abuse. Security and infrastructure teams at Fortune 500 organizations across the world rely on Cloudentity to keep their applications safe from attack.

“As enterprises move to the cloud, they are adopting distributed microservices and API-first applications, which present performance and security risks to identity and authorization platforms that are required to safely deploy applications,” said Nathanael Coffing, Co-Founder, Cloudentity.

APIs now account for over 80 percent of all web traffic and are expected to be the most frequent attack vector for data breaches by 2022. Traditional identity security approaches lack the scale and granularity to deliver the continuous user authorization required in a multi-cloud zero trust model. The problem is growing and is causing enterprises to delay the release of applications or take unwanted risks.

Cloudentity solves these challenges by delivering a new category of identity-aware authorization for multi-cloud environments to enable a cloud-native approach to API Access Control. Cloudentity enables continuous contextual, fine-grained authorization with policy enforcement at the API and service level. This approach allows business’ development teams to adopt cloud constructs more quickly by externalizing identity and authorization.

“Emerging business models in the B2B2C and OpenBanking space necessitate API-driven distributed services protected by an authorization and governance solution like ours,” added Coffing. “Cloudentity sits at the convergence between Identity and Application Infrastructure, providing Continuous Contextual Authorization for zero trust API security. We are thrilled to have ForgePoint Capital and WestWave Capital behind us to help achieve this vision.”

“We’re excited to lead the Series A financing round for Cloudentity and invest in its proven team and vision for Continuous Contextual Authorization. Cloudentity has amassed significant customer and industry partnership momentum. The company is executing on the promise of scaling API security and control policies to enterprises, which helps protect its customers against the new wave of API threats,” said Sean Cunningham, Managing Director at ForgePoint Capital.