Passbolt raises $8 million for open source password manager for teams

Password managers have become commonplace at this point. But businesses often have different needs than consumers. Teams, after all, often need to share credentials to access resources, while IT and security teams need ways to manage who has access to them. PassboltThe company, which announced an $8 million 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 Passbolt team, led by a French-born CEO Kevin Mullerargues that most organizations are not well served by what it claims are more consumer-oriented tools like Bitwarden or 1Password. “For example, you look at Bitwarden or even 1Password, what they’ve done is, on the one hand, they have simple password management for the workforce, and then they’ve built a secret manager or bought a secret manager. DevOps teams and then build something else for authentication,” Muller said. “So it’s quite fragmented. One of the problems is that these tools often can’t talk to each other. They’re very independent.”

Muller previously founded the e-learning platform Click on French and was a web development consultant in India. In 2017, he co-founded Passbolt with Remy Bertot and Cédric Alfonsi after prototyping an open source community publication for several years.

The service is partly based on this Keepasspopular open source password manager, but as Muller points out, KeePass was never built for them. KeePass itself is already widely popular among tech groups, but it essentially creates a single static file where credentials are securely stored, he said. It can easily be shared between team members, but so there’s no way to easily control who has access to it and audit (or revoke) access, among other things.

“What we wanted was more cooperation, more security and more control,” Muller said. “By control I mean: How do we install it behind a firewall on a server we manage? How can we communicate this? How do we share passwords, secrets, and all kinds of credentials in detail?”

Over the past few years, the team has added features such as native desktop apps, password expiration and rotations, a tool to retrieve two-factor authentication codes, and role-based access control for using Passbolt’s own user interface. One of the next features on the horizon is support for managing toggle switches.

In the long term, the Passbolt team would like to challenge more enterprise-centric Privileged Access Management (PAM) services like CyberArk, Muller told me.

Today, Passbolt offers a free community edition that users can host themselves, as well as a self-hosted Pro edition ($49/month for 10 locations) with LDAP provisioning, single sign-on support, activity logs, and additional features. more. Like many other open source projects, Passbolt offers a hosted solution (starting at $54 per month for 10 locations).

About 38,000 teams use the free version, while 2,000 teams pay for Passbolt services. The majority of users (75%) choose to be self-hosted.

As Müller emphasized, the code is regularly audited and Passbolt is SOC2 Type II certified.

Passbolt, which is based in Luxembourg and currently has around 30 employees, actually reached profitability in the summer of 2024. But the team still decided to increase to take advantage of the current growth and to answer the feature requests of their users.

The company’s Series A round was led by the Netherlands Airbridge Equity Partners. Existing investors Expon Capital’s Digital Technology fund, ScaleFund, seed farmer, is dedicatedBondi Capital, Carricha Capital and LBAN It also participated with angel investors such as Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excellium Services) and Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg).

“Legacy password managers like KeePass or Bitwarden and Privileged Access Management solutions like CyberArk are lacking for today’s cross-functional, distributed and agile teams,” said Rick van Boekel, managing partner at Airbridge Equity Partners. “Passbolt’s organic traction across industries validates the demand for a more collaborative, enterprise-grade solution, and their impressive SaaS metrics prove that Passbolt users are satisfied with the solution offered.”