Co-founders Cédric Alfonsi, Kevin Muller and Rémi Bertot; Credit: Passbolt / Silicon Luxembourg

Incubated at the Technoport in Esch-sur-Alzette, Passbolt, the privacy-first, open source password manager for teams, has continued its development with new funds worth €2 million; this investment will enable the company to respond rapidly to an exponential demand for data security.

Passbolt is a Luxembourg-based company that simplifies and secures passwords. Many developers and marketers today work with systems outside their company, accessible by passwords, with differentiated access levels and shared accounts. Regarded as the safe of passwords used in companies, Passbolt acts as a guarantor of secure access management (applications, social networks, external servers) and acts as a link between different users.

Co-founded in December 2016 by Kevin Muller, a French entrepreneur who previously ran a web agency in India for fifteen years, along with Rémy Bertot and Cédric Alfonsi, the startup benefited from the Fit 4 Start programme at its start and quickly showed a strong capacity for growth.

Co-founder Kevin Muller explained: “We now have close to 100,000 users and they are keeping us on our toes”. The startup has already doubled its workforce from six to twelve in 2020. With the funding obtained, it aims to increase the capacity of the technical teams, while specifying that it is looking for “Swiss Army Knife type profiles”, used to working in open source with seasoned developers.

The fundraising took place in two stages: first €1.1 million was announced in October 2020, following negotiations that were delayed due to the health crisis; then €900,000 was announced on 4 December 2020. Investors included Expon Capital, on behalf of the Digital Tech Fund, the Luxembourg public investment fund. The company also counts on support from ScaleFund II, a Belgian partner, as well as other Benelux funds such as Seeder Fund, Dedicated and Bondi Capital.

On top of its free and community oriented software (Passbolt CE), Passbolt offers two commercial versions of its product: one for professionals – Passbolt Pro, which can be downloaded on the company’s server; and another – Passbolt Cloud, which is intended for smaller teams and individuals and allows them to manage their passwords more simply, with enhanced data and privacy control.

This information was first published in an article on Silicon Luxembourg.