In what has been a difficult year for funding, one Broomfield startup pulled in a sizeable round after being bootstrapped for five years.
FusionAuth raised a $65 million growth equity investment from Updata Partners on Wednesday. FusionAuth CEO and founder Brian Pontarelli said this is the startup’s first funding round and is equivalent to a Series A.
Designed for developers, FusionAuth is a customer identity and access management platform. With FusionAuth, developers can add user multifactor authentication, authorization, registration and more to their products to enhance security. The company offers a free and premium product that can be self-hosted or cloud-based and can work with any language architecture.
Requiring a developer to build and add this security measurement to a platform that has millions of users is hard and time-consuming, Pontarelli told Colorado Inno.
“Security is hard,” he said. “It’s a waste of their time. It’s like plumbing. It’s critical to their app, so they need to do it. We just give them that solution.”
In 2018, FusionAuth spun out of Pontarelli’s first venture, CleanSpeak, a profanity filter and moderation platform still in operation. Since launching, FusionAuth has had 13 million downloads, more than 450 paying customers and 5,000 customers using FusionAuth’s free version.
The company has also more than doubled its revenue each year, according to a statement.
“The market demand is going through the roof,” Pontarelli said. “To scale to meet that demand is critical. That’s the reason to take the funding.”
The fresh capital will be put largely toward hiring efforts, with a focus on marketing, sales, product and engineering talent. The startup currently has 26 employees and plans to have 30 by the end of the year.
Pontarelli said the mentality of the FusionAuth team is to work smarter, not harder, so in addition to hiring, he intends to optimize as needed rather than “throw bodies” at the company.
Future plans for FusionAuth include launching new products next year.
The company has been profitable since 2018 but raised venture capital to quickly grow at scale. Pontarelli said he doesn’t plan to raise another round of capital. Instead, he expects to get back to profitability in two to four years.
