Startup Doppler Inc. has closed a $6.5 million funding round from a group of high-profile investors to widen the adoption of its secrets management platform, which helps developers secure their applications.

Alphabet Inc.’s GV fund led the round, which Doppler announced on Thursday. GV was joined in the investment by Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and about a dozen others.

Doppler said that it has grown 6,280%, off an undisclosed but surely small base, since its previous capital raise, a $2.3 million seed round announced last October.

The startup’s namesake platform helps developers manage secrets, which are pieces of data such as passwords that are used to secure an application. The term covers not only passwords but also many other types of records. Secrets can include the encryption keys used to protect customer data, certain configuration information and application programming interface keys, which services rely on to verify requests from external systems.

Managing secrets is difficult because there can be dozens or hundreds of them in a software project. Doppler’s answer is a centralized cloud-based interface that allows developers to manage everything in one place. Software teams can organize secrets in collections based on what applications they belong to and modify secrets when necessary through a relatively simple command-line tool.

Doppler says its approach of centralizing management reduces the amount of effort required to maintain secrets on an ongoing basis. When developers need to make a change, such as refreshing an encryption key, they can do so via the Doppler interface and the modification will automatically be synchronized across all the affected workloads.

The startup also provides security tools for ensuring the integrity of secrets. There are access controls that allow software teams to control which user can access what item and a version tracker that logs every single change made in Doppler. If a change causes an unexpected error, the version tracker can double as a backup tool, allowing developers to revert the affected secret quickly to the most recent correct version.

Doppler will use the new funding to roll out more features as it works to target large enterprises with its platform. The startup has already built up a sizable installed base in the developer community, claiming to have users across some 79 countries.

The $6.5 million round signals confidence on the part of Doppler’s investors in its ability to challenge the bigger and more established players in the secrets management segment. The major cloud providers provide native secrets management tools as part of their platforms, while a number of other players, including HashiCorp Inc., offer standalone products with similar features. 

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