Tesseral, a startup for open source authentication infrastructure for business-to-business (B2B) software companies, announced its emergence from stealth with $3.3 million in seed financing on Tuesday. Investors include Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham, co-founders of Y Combinator; Calvin French-Owen, co-founder and former CTO of Segment, Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak, co-founders of Gem, and Mike Wiacek, founder of Stairwell.
Tesseral aims to resolve challenges B2B companies face in implementing and maintaining authentication systems due to “complex permissioning” models and enterprise security standards. It makes use of a secure, scalable authentication service in just a few lines of code.
The platform offers support for enterprise authentication standards, including Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM), for integration with existing identity providers. This makes it especially suitable for multitenant applications that require sophisticated permission models and compliance with enterprise security protocols.
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“Auth remains a sensitive, challenging, and yet ubiquitous challenge for developers. For all the changes that will visit the SaaS industry over the next decade, authentication isn’t going anywhere, and fast-moving teams can’t afford to burn time and energy building in-house solutions,” said Ned O’Leary, co-founder and CEO of Tesseral. “Tesseral empowers startups with secure, production-grade infrastructure that’s fast to implement, easy to maintain, and secure. We’re incredibly excited to open this new chapter for our company and to support the next generation of software innovation.”
Tesseral plans to make use of its funding to accelerate the development of its comprehensive authentication platform. Tesseral’s leadership team, co-founders Ned O’Leary and Ulysse Carion, previously built an open source enterprise single sign-on (SSO) tool, SSOReady, which gained traction for simplifying SAML-based authentication for developers, used by customers including Gumloop, GovAI, and RunReveal.
“Tesseral solves a real problem for developers. Everyone needs auth, but it’s still surprisingly painful,” said Dalton Caldwell, managing partner at Y Combinator. “Ned and Ulysse have built something elegant that developers actually want to use—and that’s rare.”