The developer-focused customer identity and access management platform FusionAuth said today it has closed a bumper $65 million investment from Updata Partners.

The round marks the first time FusionAuth, officially known as Inversoft Inc., has raised capital externally. The company said it will use the funds to scale its go-to-market teams and accelerate product development.

FusionAuth aims to help developers solve questions around user security without distracting them from building their primary application. To do this, it has created a customer identity and access management platform that gives developers an easier way to authenticate, authorize and manage user access to their apps. Administrators can assign roles to team members and secure logins using single sign-on techniques across the web, mobile and desktop devices.

Developers can use FusionAuth to set up multifactor authentication, passwordless login, passkey support, machine-to-machine authentication and advanced threat detection, the company said. These capabilities can be accessed via a library of application programming interfaces and software development kits, and developers can work with them in any common programming language.

FusionAuth’s platform also extends to security, giving admins a way to detect anomalous logins, block user accounts post attack and access apps through federated logins. With these tools, admins can protect and control application data and ensure it remains compliant.

The community edition of FusionAuth is entirely free to use and has been downloaded more than 13 million times, the company says. It also offers paid subscriptions for customers that want access to premium features and support.

The company claims it has already become profitable, even though it has never sought funding prior to today’s round. It was founded in 2018 and claims to have more than 450 enterprise customers across six continents, including companies such as Stihl Inc., Frontdoor Inc., Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. and Consumer Direct.

FusionAuth founder and Chief Executive Brian Pontarelli said authentication is a mission-critical component for most applications. Given its importance, it becomes a big distraction for developers and product teams, especially as many are not security experts. “Product teams can no longer afford to take on the risk and complexity of building their own solutions,” he said.

Besides being simple to integrate with any application via an API, FusionAuth provides users with full hosting flexibility. The software can be deployed on any computer device or server, the company said. In other words, developers can run it locally, on a virtual or cloud server, on dedicated hardware, or alternatively use FusionAuth’s very own managed hosting environment, FusionAuth Cloud.

Updata principal Dan Moss explained that he was attracted to FusionAuth because of its developer-centric approach. “It is removing the friction and complexity of customer identity management, which are historically huge pain points, from the development process,” he said.

Image: FusionAuth