We’re excited to announce that we led Common Fate’s $3.1M Seed round, alongside Haystack and Essence VC.
Common Fate simplifies and automates access controls of cloud infrastructure and critical applications, while ensuring security best practice.
As more infrastructure and responsibility gets abstracted away in the cloud, identity permissions are becoming increasingly important for managing access to resources, aligning with compliance, and making sure users are only provided the least amount of privileges to get their job done.
But putting in place the right identity and access management (IAM) policies is often a puzzle for security and operations teams who need to balance the risk of attacks with the threat of slowing down the business and drawing fire from colleagues. Adding to this, there is an endless combination of permissions for AWS services alone and the enterprise footprint is constantly expanding. Needless to say, cloud IAM is incredibly hard.
Specific to the pains of developers, bypassing the headache of IAM can entail excessive role privileges by default, which only balloons the risk for insider threats and compromise, and instances of excessive permissions left deployed in production services due to how complex they are to craft and comprehend under the time pressure to ship features.
While privileged access tools and identity governance solutions exist, they tend to miss the mark and fail to put enough emphasis on the developer experience (the ultimate end user of the tools).
Common Fate is flipping the identity security model on its head by focusing on the developer and building tools designed around a seamless and secure experience. With Common Fate, developers can request and assume roles, admins can approve and manage access, and security teams can enforce policies, audit actions, and remediate misconfigurations.
This is all built upon a suite of open source tools including:
We’re excited to see Common Fate gaining traction with hundreds of happy users and dozens of enterprises across the globe in industries like tech, healthcare, finance, and payments, who rely on Common Fate to optimize and manage access control workflows and automate least privilege. Check out some of the positive write ups from the community!
Founders Fraser Ricupero and Chris Norman hail from Perth, Australia. Prior to Common Fate, Fraser and Chris ran a cloud consulting business called Exponent. At the time, they realized that all of the issues that they ran into were IAM problems and were the same across small and large companies. They ended up building open source projects on their nights and weekends, and when they saw excitement about the tools start to take off, they knew that it was the right time to transform the identity experience for developers.
While Perth is the literal furthest place from NYC, it’s been incredible to work with the team and help get them up to speed with the developer ecosystem and customers in the city. When they made the trip to NYC in November, they fit right in and we were even able to celebrate with Work-Bench’s favorite activity - karaoke.
Congratulations to Fraser, Chris, and the Common Fate team!
Check out more coverage about the team and what they’re building in TechCrunch.
