Password managers have become commonplace at this point. But businesses often have different needs than consumers. Teams, after all, often have to share credentials to access resources, all while IT and security teams need ways to control who has access to them. Passbolt, which is announcing an $8 million seed round Thursday, aims to become the de facto password manager for small and midsize businesses, with ambitions to serve enterprise customers in the long run.
The Passbolt team, led by its France-born CEO Kevin Muller, argues that most organizations are not served well by what he argues are more consumer-oriented tools like Bitwarden or 1Password. “You look at Bitwarden, for example, or even 1Password, what they are doing is they have, at one end, a simple password management for the workforce, and then they built a secret manager — or they purchased a secret manager — for the DevOps teams, and then they build something else for authentication,” Muller said. “So it’s quite fragmented. And one of the problems is that these tools, most of the time, cannot talk to each other. They are very much standalone.”
Muller previously founded e-learning platform Click on French and ran a web development consultancy in India. He founded Passbolt in 2017, together with Remy Bertot and Cédric Alfonsi, after previously prototyping the opens source community edition for a few years.
The service is based, in part, on Keepass, the popular open source password manager, but as Muller stressed, KeePass was never built for them. KeePass itself is already widely popular with technical teams, but it essentially creates a single static file where credentials are securely stored, he noted. This can easily be shared among team members, but because of that, there is no way to easily control who has access to it and there is no way to audit access (or revoke it), among other things.
“What we wanted was more collaboration, more security, and more control,” Muller said. “With control I mean: How do we install it behind our firewall on a server that we manage? How do we have it interoperable? How do we share passwords, secrets, and all types of credentials granularly?”
Over the course of the last few years, the team added features like native desktop apps, password expiry and rotations, a tool for getting two-factor authentication codes, and role-based access controls for using Passbolt’s own user interface. One of the next features on the horizon is support for managing passkeys.
In the long run, the Passbolt team would also like to challenge the more enterprise-centric Privileged Access Management (PAM) services like CyberArk, Muller told me.
Today, Passbolt offers a free community edition that users can self-host, as well as a self-hosted Pro edition ($49/month for 10 seats) with additional features like LDAP provisioning, single-sign-on support, activity logs, and more. Like so many other open source projects, Passbolt also offers a hosted solution (starting at $54 per month for 10 seats.
About 38,000 teams use the free version, with 2,000 paying for Passbolt’s services. The majority of users (75%) opt to self-host.
As Muller stressed, the code is regularly audited, and Passbolt is SOC2 Type II certified.
Passbolt, which is based in Luxembourg and currently has about 30 employees, actually reached profitability in the summer of 2024. But the team still decided to raise in order to capitalize on the current growth and to keep up with feature requests from its users.
The company’s Series A round was led by Netherlands-based Airbridge Equity Partners. Existing investors Expon Capital’s Digital Tech Fund, ScaleFund, Seeder, Dedicated, Bondi Capital, Carricha Capital, and LBAN also participated, along with angel investors like Christophe Bianco (co-founder of Excellium Services) and Xavier Buck (co-founder of Datacenter Luxembourg).
“Legacy password managers like KeePass or Bitwarden and Privileged Access Management solutions such as CyberArk fall short for today’s cross-functional, distributed and agile teams,” said Rick van Boekel, managing partner at Airbridge Equity Partners. “Passbolt’s organic traction across various industries confirms the demand for a more collaborative, enterprise-grade solution, and their impressive SaaS metrics prove that Passbolt users are delighted with the solution offered.”