ConductorOne co-founders brought their Bay Area-born startup to Portland in 2021 following family connections to the Pacific Northwest and the lure of the region’s talent.
“We thought it’s a good place to build,” said CEO Alex Bovee, who returned to the West Coast after a stint in Florida. “There is talent in engineering, and Portland is well known for design talent, especially coming out of footwear brands like Nike and Adidas, And then (software makers like) New Relic have development focused teams.”
Add to that the alumni networks of its University of Oregon and Oregon State University alums on staff, and the company has found an ample hiring pool, Bovee added.
ConductorOne has added to its success in Portland with a significant expansion of its latest funding round. It added venture firm Felicis and several new angel investors. The additional $12 million brought the round to $27 million, which is a big early stage round by Portland standards.
ConductorOne finds a home in Portland
The company has 45 employees. About one-third are in Portland, one-third are in the Bay Area and one-third are remote. The startup recently moved into an office in the Fair-Haired Dumbbell building on the east side of the Burnside Bridge.
The company’s software automates access and permissions to applications and infrastructure during what would otherwise be a time-consuming and manual process. It now manages access for customers including cloud service provider DigitalOcean, finance operations platform Ramp and managed security operator DeepWatch.
ConductorOne’s products are based on the experience both Bovee and co-founder Paul Querna had at security firm Okta (Nasdaq: OKTA).
“I led zero-trust products at Okta,” which was done mostly through authenticating users and devices and single sign-on, Bovee said. “Companies adopt this technology and still get breached. Identities are still the top way companies are compromised. Identity needed a different approach and SSO wasn’t going to cut it.”
ConductorOne’s newest tool for Cloud access management ensures the least amount of access is given to a user to complete whatever task is necessary.
Funding round accelerates business
ConductorOne's expanded funding round will help it build on its recent momentum.
In a time when venture funding is harder to secure, Bovee said he feels fortunate to have had such a successful experience. The company’s seed round was led by Accel in 2021. The investor then approached the company about leading a Series A round, Bovee said. Then later the ConductorOne team was introduced to Felicis through a mutual acquaintance. After brief talks it was clear the investor and the company were aligned on strategy and the company reopened the funding round.
“The reality is we were being conservative over the last year for the macroeconomics,” around the start of the Series A raise, Bovee said. “Our customers wanted more products and wanted us to do more. With a little more money (from Felicis) we are able to run faster.”
Bovee added that the company didn’t need to raise the extra money. It is generating revenue, gaining traction with customers and onboarding new customers. What the added capital will do is help it fund more research and development and continue to build the go-to-market team.
The company is hiring across engineering, product, design and sales.
As Bovee has gotten connected in the community he noted it is smaller than the Bay Area but, “there is some real, in my opinion, sparks of brightness in the community of folks doing awesome things with tech.”
