After two years in stealth mode, Cambridge startup Conjur is now seeking to commercialize its “access-control-as-a-service” — which aims to solve some of the yet-unaddressed challenges of securing cloud applications and data.
In July, the company raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from two Cambridge venture capital firms — Avalon Ventures and Amplify Partners — as well as Andy Palmer, a Boston-area angel investor and serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded Vertica Systems.
That month the nine-person company also moved from Palmer’s startup office Koa Labs in Harvard Square into the Avalon office in Cambridge, said Elizabeth Lawler, co-founder and CEO of Conjur.
Lawler is a data scientist who previously served as chief data officer of Generation Health (acquired by CVS) and as deputy director of the Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center.
She founded Conjur in 2011 with her husband, company CTO Kevin Gilpin, who was previously CTO of Boston semantic technology firm Praxeon.
Access control — i.e., the way that companies manage access by employees or users to various resources — is currently not tailored to the needs of “Infrastructure 2.0,” in which cloud-based applications and big data are the new realities, according to Lawler.
The typical way of doing access control is to bake it into every part of an IT infrastructure and then manage it through a variety of tools, she said. But the management process has become a major challenge in the increasingly complex world of Infrastructure 2.0, Lawler said.
“The goal of Conjur is really to build out access control for the new infrastructure — as a service,” she said. “We really are highly tailored toward the cloud.”
Conjur accomplishes this by centralizing access control — making access control processes more transparent and simpler to manage — while also offering better tracking of where data is going and how it’s being used, Lawler said.
The ultimate benefit: companies using Conjur can accelerate their cloud adoption, deployment of new software and discovery of connections in data, she said. Industries the startup is targeting include health care, biopharma, financial services and software.
Conjur is offering its service via a hosted monthly subscription and through on-premises deployment. The service is already being used by some large enterprise organizations, though the names aren’t being disclosed, Lawler said.
At Avalon, Conjur is working with partners Rich Levandov and Brady Bohrmann. Avalon’s fundings have included an early investment in Zynga as well as funding for Boston-area startups including Kinvey, Cloudant and Backupify.
Conjur is also working with Amplify founder and managing partner Sunil Dhaliwal, a former Battery Ventures partner who announced the launch of Amplify in January.