Scytale Inc., a founding contributor to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) SPIFFE and SPIRE projects, today announced $5 million in investment from new investors Bain Capital Ventures, TechOperators, and Work-Bench. Bessemer Venture Partners also participated, having led the company's last $3 million investment. Scytale will use the capital to launch its commercial offering based on the popular open-source projects.

"In an increasingly complex and fragmented enterprise IT environment, Scytale has not only built SPIFFE's amazing open-source community but has also delivered a commercial offering to address hybrid cloud authentication challenges faced by Fortune 500 identity and access management engineering teams," said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. "Scytale enables enterprises to more easily accelerate cloud adoption and reduce development efforts while also standardizing and automating service authentication. We are excited by Scytale's growing traction and huge potential to unlock innovation and efficiency for large-scale distributed software systems at major companies."

"From our experiences not only as investors but also as technologists within some of the world's largest financial institutions, we have heard repeatedly from enterprise CIOs and CISOs that while dynamic computing capabilities like public cloud, containers, and microservices offer the promise of speed and agility, regulatory-driven risk policies and controls, such as those that identify and authenticate services, are difficult to evolve or change," said Jonathan Lehr, general partner at Work-Bench. "We're excited by SPIFFE's promise of delivering a flexible, backward-compatible mechanism to uniformly identify software services within and across an enterprise. This will enable Scytale customers to easily extend their existing, hardened, authentication controls to any dynamic platform that they adopt."

"Scytale and the SPIFFE community believe that adopting a consistent identity model for software services is a critical capability that enables enterprises to more quickly evolve to hybrid cloud models and deliver greater value to its customers faster," said Sunil James, Scytale's chief executive officer. "We are looking forward to bringing to market a foundational capability that will also help enterprise security and infrastructure teams standardize and accelerate services authentication across any platform, putting them on a great path towards developing zero trust security infrastructure."

Scytale also announced today the availability of Scytale Enterprise, industry-first service identity management for the cloud-native enterprise. Scytale Enterprise enables frictionless service authentication across cloud, container, and on-premise platforms.

Scytale will be demonstrating their new enterprise solution at RSA 2019 (Booth#103). Enterprises can request a demo here.

About Scytale

Founded in 2017 by seasoned engineers from Amazon Web Services, Google, Okta, PagerDuty, and Duo Security, Scytale helps enterprise security engineering teams standardize and accelerate service authentication across cloud, container, and on-premise infrastructure. For more information visit scytale.io.

About Bain Capital Ventures

Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. The firm invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from security and cloud infrastructure to logistics and e-commerce to finance and healthcare. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Rent the Runway, SendGrid, SurveyMonkey, Taleo, TellApart and Turbonomic. Bain Capital Ventures has $4.9 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn or Twitter.

About Work-Bench

Work-Bench is an enterprise technology focused VC fund based in New York City. Work-Bench invests in the next era of enterprise founders selling into the Fortune 500 and supports startups through customer acquisition and community. The firm's investments include CoreOS, Cockroach Labs, Algorithmia, Merlon Intelligence, Dialpad, Socure, and other leading enterprise startups. Follow Work-Bench on Twitter and sign up for the 15K+ subscriber Enterprise Weekly newsletter.