Password managers are common these days. However, businesses often have different needs than consumers. After all, teams often need to share credentials to access resources, but IT and security teams need a way to control who has access to them. Passbolt, which announced an $8 million seed round on Thursday, aims to become the de facto password manager for small and medium-sized businesses, with long-term ambitions to serve enterprise customers.
The Passvolt team, led by French-born CEO Kevin Muller, argues that most organizations are not working well with tools that are more consumer-oriented, like Bitwarden and 1Password. “If you look at Bitwarden or 1Password, for example, what they do is they do simple password management for their employees on the one hand, and then they build a secret manager for their employees, or they create a secret manager for their employees. The DevOps team builds something else for authentication,” Muller said. “So it's very fragmented. And one of the problems is that most of the time these tools can't talk to each other. They're very independent entities.”
Image credit: Passvolt
Muller previously founded the e-learning platform Click on French and ran a web development consulting firm in India. He founded Passbolt with Remy Bertot and Cédric Alfonsi in 2017 after several years of prototyping open source community editions.
The service is partially based on KeePass, a popular open source password manager, but as Muller emphasized, KeePass was never built for them. He noted that KeePass itself is already widely popular among technical teams, but essentially creates a single static file in which credentials are stored securely. It can be easily shared among team members, but as such there is no easy way to control who has access to it, and in particular there is no way to audit (or revoke) access.
“What we wanted was more collaboration, more security, and more control,” says Muller. “Control is how do we install it behind the firewall on the servers that we manage? How do we make it interoperable? Passwords, secrets, all kinds of credentials. How can I share more details?”
Image credit: Passvolt
Over the past few years, the team has added features such as a native desktop app, password expiration and rotation, tools to retrieve two-factor authentication codes, and role-based access controls for using Passbolt's unique user interface. One of the upcoming features is support for passkey management.
In the long term, Muller said the Passbolt team also wants to venture into more enterprise-centric privileged access management (PAM) services like CyberArk.
Currently, Passbolt offers a free community edition that allows users to self-host, LDAP provisioning, single sign-on support, activity logging, and more. Like many other open source projects, Passbolt also offers hosted solutions (starting at $54 per month for 10 seats).
Approximately 38,000 teams use the free version, and 2,000 of those teams pay for Passbolt's services. The majority of users (75%) choose to self-host.
As Muller emphasized, the code is regularly audited and Passbolt is SOC2 Type II certified.
Luxembourg-based Passbolt, which currently employs around 30 people, actually reached profitability in the summer of 2024. However, the team decided to raise funding to capitalize on current growth and respond to feature requests from users.
The company's Series A round was led by Netherlands-based Airbridge Equity Partners. In addition to existing investors Expon Capital's Digital Tech Fund, ScaleFund, Seeder, Dicate, Bondi Capital, Carricha Capital, and LBAN, Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excelllium Services) and Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg) Angel investors also participated. ).
“Traditional password managers like KeePass and Bitwarden, and privileged access management solutions like CyberArk, are no longer relevant to today's cross-functional, distributed, agile It’s not good enough for the team.” “Passbolt's organic traction across industries confirms the demand for more collaborative, enterprise-grade solutions, and its strong SaaS metrics prove that Passbolt users are satisfied with the solutions being delivered. I am.”