30. Cerbos: access-control software to safeguard AI systems

Founders: Emre Baran, Charith Ellawala, and Alex Olivier
Year founded: 2021
Website: cerbos.dev

Every software company is united by a similar quandary: who should be able to access this platform? Building a user permissions system is extremely difficult and time-consuming, yet every application needs one. 

Cerbos aims to tackle this problem, by giving businesses access to an enterprise-ready authorisation management system that’s capable of (finally) making user permissions simple to control. 

Instead of forcing companies to build complex systems from scratch, Cerbos’s flexible, secure solution is easy to build and can be technically integrated in less than a day. 

What makes Cerbos unique is its context-aware approach to modelling permissions, which can increase security at scale, and streamline development as a result – while also letting businesses derive roles based on contextual data. 

The seeds for this business idea were planted in the 2010s, when founders Emre Baran, Charith Ellawala, and Alex Olivier found themselves constantly frustrated by the need to build authorisation from scratch for every new project they worked on. 

With the repetitive tasks involved in the process taking up valuable time, they knew a simpler solution was out there – even if they needed to build it themselves. 

Skip to the present, and the company has come a long way since its inception in 2021. Cerbos already boasts a diverse set of clients spanning industries, including workplace platforms, blockchain giants, and AI platforms, to name a few. 

The London-based startup has also been able to secure partnerships with leading technology platforms Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS, helping to consolidate its position within the technology landscape. 

More recently, this year Cerbos successfully transitioned its core commercial product, Cerbos Hub – an authorisation management system designed to support policy authoring – from beta to general availability. 

With its gaze set on becoming the default permissions solution for the majority of Fortune 500 companies in the near future, you’ll be seeing more of this startup in 2025.