ConductorOne Announces $5M Seed Funding Led by Accel, to Streamline Employee Access to the Cloud

Founded by Zero Trust experts, ConductorOne is building the first-ever identity orchestration and automation platform

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Apr 05, 2021, 09:40 ET

PORTLAND, Ore., April 5, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- ConductorOne announced today that it raised $5M in seed funding in a round led by Accel, along with Fuel Capital, Fathom Capital, and Active Capital. ConductorOne is using the funding to build the first-ever identity orchestration and automation platform, to empower IT and identity admins with the ability to automate and delegate employee access to cloud apps and infrastructure, while preserving least privilege permissions.

Companies of all sizes often have hundreds of apps and infrastructure providers they're managing. It's not unusual for an IT helpdesk queue to be more than 20% access requests, with people needing urgent access to resources like Salesforce, AWS, or GitHub. And yet each request is manually reviewed to make sure people get the right level of permissions. But that access is never revoked, even if it's unused. ConductorOne is building the world's best access request experience, with automation at the core of delivering enhanced productivity, security and compliance.

ConductorOne was founded late in 2020 by Alex Bovee, CEO, and Paul Querna, CTO, who met while leading Zero Trust strategies and products at Okta. Prior to Okta, Bovee led enterprise mobile security product development at Lookout, and earned his MBA at University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Querna was the co-founder and CTO of ScaleFT, which was acquired by Okta in 2018. Querna also led technology and strategy teams at Rackspace and Cloudkick, and is an active open source software advocate.

Bovee and Querna recognized that companies adhering to old, on-premises models of identity governance and privileged access are ill-equipped to handle the explosion of SaaS apps and cloud infrastructure. As apps, access, and permissions proliferate, many organizations are adopting Zero Trust strategies, and yet are failing to enact least privilege controls—a key tenant of Zero Trust— by either delaying timely employee access to apps, or over-permissioning employees from day one.

"When it comes to managing identity and permission lifecycles, IT teams have been stuck with error-prone, manual processes, and are bouncing between ticketing systems, SSO solutions, spreadsheets, and wikis," Bovee said. "Security and identity have 'shifted left,' which means the burden to reduce risk while enabling employee productivity has fallen to the IT team. Without a central layer to orchestrate and automate authorization, it's impossible to handle all the permissions, entitlements, and on- and off-boarding, not to mention auditing and analytics."

"Today we recognize identity and access management and customer identity and access management are each multi-billion dollar market opportunities. Automation that solves privilege management and governance is the next major pillar of cloud identity," said Ping Li, Partner at Accel. "I've known Alex and Paul for a while, and Accel is excited to partner with them. There is no team better positioned to win because they deeply understand identity and what customers need."

ConductorOne is a remote-first company and is actively recruiting a diverse, inclusive team of engineers and designers across the US. They are also inviting IT and identity admins to get on the waitlist to be the first to use their identity orchestration and automation product this summer.

About ConductorOne
ConductorOne is the first Identity Automation and Orchestration platform for IT to help secure the world's adoption of SaaS. The company is starting with the world's best access request experience for employees to get secure, timely access to business-critical cloud apps and infrastructure. ConductorOne is supported by Accel, Fuel Capital, Fathom Capital, and Active Capital, and is hiring a remote-first team. Visit ConductorOne at https://www.conductorone.com/, or on Twitter and LinkedIn.

About Accel
Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Braintree, Cloudera, Crowdstrike, DJI, DocuSign, Dropbox, Etsy, Facebook, Flipkart, Freshworks, Jet, Pillpack, Qualtrics, Slack, Spotify, Supercell, Tenable, UiPath, and Venmo are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 35+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more, visit www.accel.com or www.twitter.com/accel.

SOURCE ConductorOne