Smallstep — Developer first certificate management, welcome to boldstart
At boldstart, we love to partner with founders who are on a mission to not only make developers more productive but also their organizations more secure. We’ve had the pleasure to partner on Day 1 with companies like Snyk which pioneered shift left security for developers, Jit.io which offers security as code and a MVS program, and now Smallstep, which is automating certificate management for developers.
Operations teams and developers spend countless hours managing identities and cryptographic certificates to secure who can access what. When these certificates expire, it’s painful and slows things down. We have all run into something that looks like this:
Enter Smallstep, a developer-friendly toolkit for operators to automate certificate management, speed up development, and secure increasingly complex distributed systems. Today we are thrilled to announce our seed and follow-on investment in Smallstep’s Series A alongside our friends at Stepstone Global, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Upside Partnership, and Ridgeline.
When we met founder Mike Malone in 2016, it was clear he was on a mission and we knew we wanted to partner with him immediately. Before Smallstep, Mike spent years building and managing distributed systems at companies like Betable and SimpleGeo. He’s also a co-author of popular OSS projects like OAuth and oEmbed, making him the perfect founder for a company deep into production identity and infrastructure security.
Smallstep (repos here) has built one of the most popular open-source certificate authorities with over 4M downloads. Even more exciting is that these downloads have converted into rapidly growing commercial adoption by customers ranging from Celonis and Bolt — to global automotive, financial, and telecommunications companies.
We’ve learned that building great developer first products and communities take time. It’s been 6 years since our initial investment in Smallstep’s founding round and we’re thrilled to continue our partnership with Mike and the whole team at Smallstep as it continues to capture a massive market opportunity securing the cloud-native enterprise.
Read more by Ron Miller @ TC here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/28/smallstep-takes-big-step-toward-authenticating-machine-to-machine-communications/
Also by founder Mike Malone on Smallstep’s blog: https://smallstep.com/blog/how-we-got-here-smallstep-raises-series-a-funding/
