Permit.io, an Israeli start-up that helps companies build permission systems into their products, announced Tuesday that they have raised $6 million in seed funding.
This round was led by seed-stage venture capital firm NFX, which invests in early-stage companies in the US and Israel, along with previous investor NYC & LA-based VC firm Rainfall Ventures.
There were also many angel investors including Cheryl Hung, Engineering Manager at Apple and former VP of Ecosystem at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), and Nitzan Shapira, CEO and co-founder of Epsagon.
Permit.io’s full-stack authorization framework essentially helps developers access control to their cloud-native applications within minutes, taking away the problem of constantly having to rebuild them.
The company’s founders have “a unique vision that doesn’t just look at what’s broken and needs to be fixed, but rather envisions a new and completely different reality,” according to NFX general partner Gigi Levy-Weiss.
The company understands what engineers deal with today and how this impacts their organizations, allowing them to create a solution that “reorganizes the ecosystem, and how it’s interconnected safely through access controls,” he said.
Permit.io was co-founded by Or Weis, former CEO and co-founder of Rookout, and Asaf Cohen, former software engineer at Facebook and Microsoft.
“As an industry, we needed to solve the problem of authentication before we started to think more seriously about permissions,” Weis said.
“If I were to use an analogy, authentication is like the security receptionist at the front-desk checking IDs – it’s the first layer of protection and there’s great tooling already available here,” he said.
“But at Permit.io we are focused on the next step, which is a bit more complicated – determining what people are allowed to do once they are inside the application.”
Constrained user interfaces restrict users’ access to resources, information and functions, so many developers spend a lot of time trying to create access control interfaces necessary for applications.
“With Rookout, I ended up rebuilding access control five times. That’s probably four times – if not five times – too much,” Weis told TechCrunch. “And when I talked to Asaf about it, we both quickly reminisced about so many times we built this from scratch.
“This is a constant problem that annoys all developers and we just want to get rid of it.”
Permit.io software provides all the required infrastructure to build and implement end-to-end permissions out of the box, which allows organizations to bake in fine-grained controls, makes authorization simple and ends the struggle of creating permissions from scratch.