Passbolt raises $8M for its private equity manager

Password managers have become popular during this time. But businesses often have different needs than consumers. Organizations, after all, often need to share information to access resources, while IT and security teams need ways to control who has access. Passboltwhich is announcing an $8 million seed round on Thursday, aims to be a password manager for small and medium-sized businesses, with plans to serve business customers in the long term.

The Passbolt Group, led by its French-born CEO Kevin MullerHe says that many organizations are underserved by what he says are over-the-counter tools like Bitwarden or 1Password. “You look at Bitwarden, for example, or 1Password, what they’re doing is they have simple passwords for employees, and then they built a password manager – or they bought a password manager – for employees. DevOps teams, then they create something that be confirmed,” said Muller. “So they’re fragmented. And one of the problems is that these devices, in most cases, don’t talk to each other. They’re very independent.”

Muller previously founded the e-learning platform Click on French and ran a web development consultancy in India. He founded Passbolt in 2017, together with Remy Bertot and Cédric Alfonsi, after already presenting the open source version to the public for several years.

The service is based, among other things, on KeePassopen source password manager, but as Muller emphasized, KeePass is not built for them. KeePass itself is already popular with technology groups, but it creates only one file where information is securely stored, he said. This can be easily shared among the members of the group, but because of this, there is no way to easily control who has access and there is no way to monitor (or stop), among other things.

“What we wanted was more cooperation, more security, and more control,” Muller said. “By control I mean: How do we put it behind our firewall on the server that we manage? How do we connect it? How do we share passwords, secrets, and all kinds of information at a glance?”

Over the past few years, the team has added features such as desktop software, password expiration and flexibility, a tool for obtaining two-factor authentication codes, and security measures using the Passbolt interface. One of the features on the horizon is support for managing passkeys.

In time, Passbolt’s team also wants to challenge Privileged Access Management (PAM) services like CyberArk, Muller told me.

Today, Passbolt offers a free version of groups that users can have on their own, as well as a self-hosted program ($49/month for 10 seats) with additional features such as LDAP provisioning, support for single sign-on, work logs, and more. Like many other open source projects, Passbolt also offers a hosting solution (starting at $54 per month for 10 seats).

About 38,000 groups use the free version, and 2,000 pay for Passbolt services. Most users (75%) choose to do it themselves.

As Muller emphasized, the code is regularly reviewed, and Passbolt is SOC2 Type II certified.

Passbolt, which is based in Luxembourg and currently has around 30 employees, became profitable in the summer of 2024. But the team still decided to upgrade to take advantage of the existing growth and to follow the requests of users.

The company’s Series A round was led by the Netherlands Airbridge Equity Partners. Existing vendors The concept of the company Expon Capital Digital Tech Money, ScaleFund, Seeder, VolunteerBondi Capital, Carricha Capital, and LBAN also participated, along with angel investors such as Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excellium Services) and Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg).

“Password managers like KeePass or Bitwarden and Privileged Access Management Solutions like CyberArk are missing from today’s enterprise, distributed and aging teams,” said Rick van Boekel, managing partner at Airbridge Equity Partners. “Passbolt’s organic traction in various industries confirms the importance of a functional, business-friendly approach, and impressive SaaS metrics confirm that Passbolt users are happy with the solution provided.”