Opal Raises $1.8M from Greylock to Help Enterprises Adopt Next Generation Access Policies

Opal leverages deep integrations to help companies simplify just-in-time access and automate user access reviews.

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#accessmanagement–Today, Opal, a next-generation access management platform, announced the launch of the company with $1.8M in seed funding led by Greylock and the general availability of its platform. Other angel investors include Expanse CEO Tim Junio, Abnormal Security CEO Evan Reiser, and Signal Sciences CEO Andrew Peterson. Opal’s platform provides comprehensive insights and remediation policies to dynamically enforce least privilege. With versatility across industries, enterprises like Blend and CoffeeMeetsBagel have adopted Opal to streamline their access management.

Most companies either grant access broadly for the sake of convenience, or they restrict it harshly for the sake of prudence. Both scenarios have imperfect trade-offs—the former increasing the attack surface while the latter hampers employee productivity. With Opal, enterprises can now have the best of both worlds, enforcing automated least privilege without friction.

The Opal founding team comes from Dropbox, Scale, Brex, Mulesoft, and Palo Alto Networks. Stephen Cobbe, co-founder of Opal, shared: “I saw firsthand at Dropbox some of the pains of managing access at scale. Without a great solution on the market, we had to build one internally, and it was a struggle to maintain. After interviewing over one hundred technology companies, we realized that at a certain size, many companies end up building some version of Dropbox’s internal tool. We created Opal to combine the best practices across companies into a single, unifying layer for authorization.”

Opal is a catalog for engineering infrastructure, SaaS applications, and custom internal tools. Using Opal, companies can set up granular role-based access policies and delegate access requests to resource owners, so the right people get the right level of access at the right time. Opal also supports short-lived access, which dynamically updates according to support ticket statuses or on-call rotations.

“Opal is built with a delightful web user experience. Employees can make self-serve requests directly out of Slack and resource owners can approve via Slack in one-click. Developers love using our command line interface (CLI) to make requests and start sessions,” said Eugene Ling, Chief Customer Officer.

“Every enterprise knows that managing permissions at scale is challenging. More systems mean more attack vectors, places to audit, and overhead to ensure engineers have the access they need,” said Saam Motamedi, partner at Greylock. “Opal is tackling these problems with a strong team of security experts, and I look forward to partnering with them on their journey.”

About Opal

Opal is a next-generation access management platform. Through rich integrations, Opal allows companies to design intelligent access policies across developer infrastructure, popular SaaS applications, and custom internal tools. Without agents or proxies, companies can implement Opal in minutes. Backed by Greylock Partners, Opal is based in San Francisco and New York. For more information, please visit www.opal.dev or reach them at [email protected].