Styra, Inc., the founder of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leader in cloud-native authorization, announced it raised $40 million in a Series B funding round to continue driving the reinvention of policy and authorization for cloud-native applications.
The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from previous investors, A. Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Accel, as well as new investors at Capital One Ventures and Citi Ventures.
With this funding, Dharmesh Thakker, general partner at Battery Ventures will be joining the Styra board. The round further solidifies its market leadership and provides capital to accelerate its founders’ vision—to create the standard for authorization—which started with OPA.
From a product perspective, the company plans to utilize this funding to enhance Styra DAS with new policy-as-code use cases across the cloud-native stack, and expand integrations with key technology partners.
Additionally, Styra will expand its open source and developer advocacy team, ensuring OPA users find success at every stage of their journey. Styra will also continue to foster the community culture of collaboration and innovation that has made OPA so successful.
Styra will also double its current team by the end of 2021, initially in its product management, customer success, open source and go-to-market departments.
The team will support enterprise deployments as well as ramp up business development and ecosystem partnerships.
Additionally, the company plans to invest in employee career growth, people operations and diversity—ensuring it is bringing both cultural diversity and broad industry experience into the organization.
OPA and Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), the commercial control plane for OPA, address two related but separate inflection points—cloud migration/digital transformation, and the need to rethink authorization.
Accelerated by the new requirements for remote work, legacy apps are being migrated to the cloud in earnest and new apps are cloud-native from the start. In both cases that means apps are shifting to a containerized model, are running on Kubernetes and utilize DevOps/CICD processes.
OPA, initially proven out at scale by the likes of Netflix, Capital One, Atlassian, Pinterest and others, has now reached the point of over one million downloads per week.
“Our vision has always been to create the standard for authorization—the control over what a user or service can do—and our OPA project has become just that,” said Bill Mann, CEO of Styra. “It’s exciting for OPA and Styra to be at the forefront of cloud-native, shift left, zero trust, and developer-centric architectures. This funding proves the validity of the authorization market for cloud-native applications and solidifies Styra as the leader in this critical market space.”
For more information about this news, visit www.styra.com.