Styra has raised a $40 million Series B funding round to continue driving the reinvention of policy and authorization for cloud-native applications.
The round was led by Battery Ventures with participation from previous investors, A. Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Accel, as well as new investors at Capital One Ventures and Citi Ventures. With this funding, Dharmesh Thakker, General Partner at Battery Ventures will be joining the Styra board.
The round further solidifies its market leadership and provides capital to accelerate its founders’ vision—to create the standard for authorization—which started with OPA.
OPA, initially proven out at scale by the likes of Netflix, Capital One, Atlassian, Pinterest and others, has now reached the point of over one million downloads per week, according to the company. Styra has also seen exponential business traction in 2020, achieving 300 percent customer and commercial growth year-over-year, and 90 percent headcount increase.
OPA and Styra Declarative Authorization Service (DAS), the commercial control plane for OPA, address two related but separate inflection points—cloud migration/digital transformation, and the need to rethink authorization.
Accelerated by the new requirements for remote work, legacy apps are being migrated to the cloud in earnest and new apps are cloud-native from the start. In both cases that means apps are shifting to a containerized model, are running on Kubernetes and utilize DevOps/CICD processes.
With this funding, Styra will double its current team by the end of 2021, initially in its product management, customer success, open source and go-to-market departments. The team will support enterprise deployments as well as ramp up business development and ecosystem partnerships. Additionally, the company plans to invest in employee career growth, people operations and diversity—ensuring it is bringing both cultural diversity and broad industry experience into the organization.
The company plans to utilize this funding to enhance Styra DAS with new policy-as-code use cases across the cloud-native stack, and expand integrations with key technology partners. Additionally, Styra will expand its open source and developer advocacy team, ensuring OPA users find success at every stage of their journey. Styra will also continue to foster the community culture of collaboration and innovation that has made OPA so successful.
