Stormpath Inc. today announced it has raised $1.5M in Series Seed funding. The company is building a powerful identity access control service for cloud and enterprise applications - an easy-to-use console and sophisticated APIs that manage user security both in the cloud and behind a firewall.

Stormpath Identity and Access Manager (IAM) abstracts out user security from applications, including authentication, access control, and security workflows. Unlike most identity management services, Stormpath IAM delivers a flexible user security model that any developer can use in any application. Today, many developers spend weeks or months building out identity management features within their applications, instead of developing core product functionality. With Stormpath, they can apply the most sophisticated enterprise security practices, secure passwords, integrate to existing identity systems and set up fine-grain access control, in just a few minutes.

"The goal of Stormpath is to free up developers' time so they can focus on what really matters to their product and business," said Les Hazlewood, co-founder and CTO. "Managing users in the cloud is complicated and risky; we can put years of security expertise and best practice in their applications in less time than it takes to make coffee."

"Stormpath is at the forefront of application security as a service," says Ross Mason, founder of Mulesoft. "Since every application requires user security, this service reduces the infrastructure burden, making it possible to avoid rolling the same code over and over."

The company is launching private beta this week with a Java SDK and Apache Shiro integration. Spring integration, as well as SDKs for Ruby, Python, dot.net, and javascript are scheduled for release this year.

The Stormpath team also leads the Apache Shiro project, a powerful and easy-to-use security framework that simplifies authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management within an application. While Stormpath IAM manages user policies, Shiro enforces them. Together, they power user security in applications from the smallest mobile apps to the largest enterprise applications. Stormpath also provides Shiro training and support services to government and enterprise customers. To date, Shiro has been downloaded by over 100,000 organizations.

Stormpath was founded by Les Hazlewood and Alex Salazar. Hazlewood has held senior architectural positions at Bloomberg and Delta Airlines and was formerly CTO of a software engineering firm supporting educational and government agencies. He founded and serves as PMC Chair of the Apache Shiro project, and has been committing and contributing to open source projects like the Spring Framework and JBoss for over 10 years. Les has a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Prior to founding Stormpath, Salazar was a recognized sales executive leading teams at IBM and helping Fortune 500 companies bring emerging technologies to market, including ESPN, Viacom, Bloomberg, NBC/Universal, and Government entities. Prior to IBM, Salazar was an enterprise software developer. He has a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and an MBA from Stanford University.

"As dynamic computing explodes, a critical issue for enterprises is how to address legacy applications that do not translate well to new cloud computing deployment models," said Chip Hazard, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. "Les and Alex are savvy, experienced entrepreneurs with the business and technical backgrounds to create a truly market defining service that solves the issue of identity and access management in a distributed computing environment."

"Stormpath is uniquely positioned as a thought leader in the open source community, because they deeply understand the user security challenges that cloud developers struggle with," said Peter Sonsini, general partner at New Enterprise Associates. Their solution is not only the next generation of identity and access management, it fundamentally disrupts the economics of deploying in the cloud."
"Alex and Les have put together a formidable team of experts, and the traction of Apache Shiro stands as a testament to their ability to build powerful security products," said Andy Rachleff.

Investment firms Flybridge Capital Partners and New Enterprise Associates led the round. Angel investors include Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront and Co-founder of Benchmark Capital, and Len Lehmann, investor and former chairman of Global Village, which was acquired by Zoom.

About Flybridge Capital Partners

Flybridge Capital Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm whose mission is to assist entrepreneurs in growing innovative, global companies. With $560 million under management, the firm is focused on investing in technology markets across multiple industries and is led by a team with domain expertise and more than half a century of combined experience in venture capital.

About New Enterprise Associates

New Enterprise Associates, Inc. (NEA) is a leading venture capital firm focused on helping entrepreneurs build transformational businesses across multiple stages, sectors and geographies. With approximately $11 billion in committed capital, NEA invests in information technology, healthcare and energy technology companies at all stages in a company's lifecycle, from seed stage through IPO. The firm's long track record includes more than 170 portfolio company IPOs and more than 290 acquisitions, including investments in technology leaders like Data Domain, CareerBuilder, Diapers.com, Fusion-io, Groupon, Juniper, Macromedia, Salesforce.com, and TiVo. In the U.S., NEA has offices in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area; Menlo Park, California; and New York City. In addition, New Enterprise Associates (India) Pvt. Ltd. has offices in Bangalore and Mumbai, India and New Enterprise Associates (Beijing), Ltd. has offices in Beijing and Shanghai, China.