Identity access and management startup Abbey Labs Inc. announced today that it has raised $5.25 million in new funding to accelerate its go-to-market opportunities, hiring and developer awareness.

Point72 Ventures LP led the seed round, with Haystack Partners LLC, Essence Ventures LLC and several individual investors also participating.

Founded in 2022 by Arvil Nagpal and Jeff Chao, former employees of Okta Inc. and Stripe Inc., Abbey Labs offers a platform designed to help companies secure and automate employee access to sensitive data infrastructure. The platform allows companies to improve their security and compliance programs by automatically controlling permissions so the risks around unauthorized access are limited in the event of a breach.

Nagpal and Chao are said to have created Abbey Labs with a shared vision of allowing engineers to build secure infrastructure from the start by defining access to follow the principle of least privilege and ensuring only necessary access is granted. Through tools for engineers that integrate with what they already use, Abbey Labs allows them to increase the scope of their automation.

The company claims to be addressing an enterprise need that is not currently being met: the ability to streamline and make the process by which a user has access to internal data infrastructure more efficient. Employees requesting proper access to do their jobs battle inefficient, insecure and costly layers of processes that, while aiming to make companies secure and compliant, also create bottlenecks and take away valuable work time.

Abbey Labs takes what it says is a different approach from other providers through a first-access governance platform built for engineers. The platform integrates common access workflows, such as requests and approvals, into a company’s existing developer tooling and infrastructure and integrates directly into an organization’s infrastructure provisioning process. Doing so helps to give engineers the right tools to automate access and build infrastructure securely from the start.

“During my time at Okta, I saw first-hand the struggles our customers faced with providing engineers access to critical data systems in a way that’s both secure and compliant,” Nagpal said. “We built Abbey Labs to allow companies to better control access to data systems in partnership with their engineers, not against them.”

Image: Abbey Labs