Passbolt Raises $8M Series A led by Airbridge

Today marks an exciting milestone in Passbolt's journey. We're thrilled to announce our $8 million Series A funding round, led by Airbridge Equity Partners, with participation from our historic investors including Expon Capital's Digital Tech Fund, ScaleFund, Seeder, Dedicated, Bondi Capital, Carricha Capital, and LBAN. We're also honored to have since the beginning industry veterans Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg) and Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excellium Services).

This funding will accelerate our mission of empowering millions of digital teams in collaborating securely with their passwords, accesses and secrets. Passbolt has been operating from a stable financial foundation and was already financially profitable prior to the round. This investment will enable us to grow our team, fast-track the delivery of new features for both our free community edition and paid offering, while staying committed to building a world-class open source product. 

“Traditional password managers and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions fall short for today's cross-functional, distributed and agile teams,” said Rick van Boekel, managing partner at Airbridge Equity Partners (Netherlands). “Passbolt’s organic traction across various industries confirms the demand for a more collaborative, enterprise-grade solution, and their impressive SaaS metrics prove that passbolt users are delighted with the solution offered.”

The Journey So Far

What started as a vision for a more secure and collaborative way to manage credentials has grown into a comprehensive platform trusted by over 40,000 organizations worldwide including governments, defense agencies, universities, SMBs, startups and many more.

With 7,000+ downloads per month and close to half a million of daily active users, we're seeing firsthand how critical secure password and access collaboration has become for teams of all sizes.

Passbolt’s private key architecture, used since its inception for authentication and encryption, has since become the de-facto standard for some of the most privacy-focused solutions worldwide, including blockchain systems, crypto wallets and passkeys.

It is truly inspiring to see that teams that started using passbolt a few years ago with only a handful of users have expanded into thousands inside the same organization.

We are both honored and humbled by the trust our users and customers are putting in Passbolt, and at the same time we are taking our responsibility very seriously. Being able to deliver the same quality of service at this scale requires us to grow our team, this is why we decided to raise a Series A despite being already profitable.

Why is Passbolt Essential for Modern Teams?

The landscape of work has fundamentally changed. Most companies have embraced digitalization, with their teams adopting a wide range of online apps, mobile devices and other tools, making them more distributed than ever as they work across different time zones. Digitally supported collaboration has become the new normal.

Traditional password managers and Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions weren't built for this new reality. Organizations find themselves caught between consumer-focused password managers that lack collaborative features and complex, monolithic enterprise solutions that don't support modern agile needs. In the middle, there is Keepass which is a great tool loved by millions of technical teams for the right reasons (open source, versatile, secure, on-prem) but it is not built to be utilized efficiently by multiple users.

This is where Passbolt comes in. We continue to build a new type of password and access manager that bridges this gap:

• Enabling technical teams to collaboratively manage privileged accesses (PAM) to IT, software development, and security infrastructure, leveraging fine-grained permissions and enforcing good practices such as PoLP (Principle of Least Privilege) and JIT (Just-In-Time) access through instant revocation.
• Protecting the broader workforce by enforcing strong and unique passwords to access their systems, integrated in the tools they love.
• Allowing IT managers to audit efficiently and reliably all forms of credentials accesses.
• Empowering cross-functional teams to comprehensively manage and collaborate on all organizational credentials – from simple passwords, TOTPs, SSH keys, key-value, to API tokens, in a single application for a more cohesive experience.

Finally, all these use cases revolve around three pillars that are central to our vision and reflected in everything we do: on our website, in the talks we give, as well as our internal documentation and even roadmap scoring system:

• Collaboration: Teams of all sizes granularly share all types of credentials so that they can confidently scale operations.
• Security: Full end-to-end encryption that ensures password sharing security thanks to its unique public-private key architecture.
• Open Source and Free: Passbolt Community Edition (CE) is and will always be free and fully functional. It will always contain all the features necessary for teams to collaborate efficiently on their credentials. 

We are delighted to have surrounded ourselves with investors that are fully aligned on our vision, philosophy and principles.

Our Commitment to the Community

It is a legitimate concern for open source communities to wonder what the impact of influx of capital would mean for projects such as passbolt.

Let us be clear: we are committed to being 100% open source and empower the community. Our focus on transparency and user trust remains unchanged. We do not plan to change the software license. 

Passbolt is and will remain an independent company. We will keep investing in both the community as well as the enterprise users to ensure that our platform meets diverse needs without compromising our values.

Passbolt is and will remain a European company. Our headquarters remain in Luxembourg and all our investors are based in Europe. We are committed to operating under EU regulations, ensuring the highest standards for privacy and security.

Growing Further Together

In addition to a philosophy of openness and empowering people, another reason why we are so committed to open source and to our community is simply because it works.

Passbolt’s go-to-market approach has always been community-led and product–led, where we laser focus on solely one thing: delivering a world-class product that solves the pain point of secure collaboration with passwords and accesses for teams. When you solve a pain point very well, then word of mouth comes automatically, which results in an organic growth of free users and a natural conversion of a fraction of them into paid users - all that while spending close to zero in marketing. This is known as the dual flywheel of commercial open source and has been initially described by GitLab.

This diagram explains unequivocally why a healthy, happy community is the cornerstone of our growth as an open source company as well as why we remain committed to it. 

What's Next in Practice?

This funding will fuel our next phase of growth for the coming years in several key areas:

1. Product Development: Starting with passbolt 5 which will release in a few weeks, we're accelerating development of the product features and use cases, which will bring expanded capabilities to our platform. Our public roadmap gives some insights into what is upcoming in the future versions. On a broader scale, future versions will also explore more sophisticated use cases related to Privileged Access Management (PAM) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) such as configurable workflows, authentication with third party systems, sessions management etc., all of which in one single application.
2. Global Expansion: We're scaling our international sales and support team to better serve our growing global customer base and support our 2,000+ paid customers worldwide.
3. Security and Compliance: We're investing in meeting complex security and regulatory requirements, ensuring our platform continues to meet the highest standards of enterprise security.

Join Us on This Journey

None of this would be possible without our amazing community of users, customers, and contributors. Your feedback, support, and trust have been instrumental in getting Passbolt to where it is today. We're more committed than ever to our mission of empowering digital teams in protecting, managing and collaborating with their organization credentials.

Whether you're new to passbolt or a long-time user, there's never been a more exciting time to be part of our community. Try passbolt today:

• Install the Community Edition
• Explore Passbolt Pro for enterprise features
• Get started instantly with Passbolt Cloud

Visit www.passbolt.com to learn more and join the thousands of organizations already securing their credentials with passbolt.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue building the future of credential and access management!

The founders: Kevin Muller, Cedric Alfonsi, Remy Bertot, and the Passbolt team.