SGNL: Why We Invested

Moonshots Capital’s investment thesis is simple: we invest in extraordinary leadership.

Leadership can be a difficult trait to gauge and there are different types of leadership, but there are some strong indicators. Military service is one: veterans are often literally battle-tested, and millions of dollars has been spent training them in leadership per se. Other times, it’s a prior track record of successful entrepreneurship, a high level of technical domain expertise, or a history of overcoming incredibly difficult challenges to deliver exceptional results.

I always want to see some combination of these in the founders we back, and a slick pitch deck can never tell the whole story. Ideally, I want to see leadership in action — and that’s exactly the experience I have with Scott Kriz and Erik Gustavson, the founders of SGNL

Scott, Erik and I go way back. In 2008 they both worked with me at Fastpoint Games, the first venture-backed company where I became CEO that we eventually sold to WePlay. Scott was my head of product and Erik was my head of technology. We went through a lot of ups and downs together and we knew we could trust each other when it counted.

After exiting Fastpoint Games, we brainstormed the next steps together: Scott and Erik founded Bitium, and I wrote the first check into the company and became a board member. This is when they first started working on authorization solutions: providing app management, single sign-on and analytics for cloud-based apps. After Bitium sold to Google in 2017, they stayed on to continue their mission of protecting cloud-based data — this time at one of the world’s biggest companies.

Over the years, I witnessed Scott and Erik perform at every level of management, build their own company, and refine their exceptional skills in product, engineering, and most importantly — leadership. When they left Google, I had no doubt that their next “thing” would be a game changer.

At SGNL, they are developing cutting-edge access and authorization management technology that is sorely needed among major businesses. Nowadays, every large company has data at its heart. Most data is stored in a cloud and scattered across dozens of apps employees use daily; and some of it can be sensitive, which means businesses need to take special care to make sure people only have access to data that they need to use their jobs — no more, no less.

Most existing access management software relies on roles that employees have in the organization to decide who needs to see what and how they can use it. But that’s not how things work in real life — and especially not in large enterprises. Regardless of job titles, people need to access and use different data depending on the work they are doing at the time: they need updated access for new assignments, and sometimes need to be restricted because they are working remotely from a location that has regulatory constraints. The reason this matters? Data breaches. As of 2021, a single breach costs a company an average of $4.24 million.

SGNL’s solution solves this problem by introducing more nuanced attributes — characteristics that a user has in the system — in place of rigid roles that do not evolve in real-time as employees, vendors and contractors change projects and responsibilities. By using attributes that change in real time, SGNL can grant just-in-time access: as soon as it’s needed, and only when it’s needed.

The problem is huge, and Scott and Erik are uniquely qualified to solve the problem at scale. There was never any question about adding SGNL to our portfolio.

Moonshots Capital was the second largest investor in SGNL’s $12 million Series Seed back in November 2021. We were excited to follow Costanoa Ventures who led the round, and invest alongside Fika Ventures and Resolute Ventures. In October, Scott and Erik and the rest of the amazing team they’ve assembled officially launched the SGNL platform. I’m excited to see what they have in store.

Moonshots Capital is a veteran-founded venture capital firm that invests in early-stage startups with extraordinary leaders.
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