Startup develops an enterprise-oriented version of KeePass; Raises $8M in seed funding

Passbolt is an open-source password manager based on KeePass. Its founders have apparently criticized Bitwarden, 1Password, and KeePass for not prioritizing the security workflows needed by teams.

The Passbolt team, led by its France-born CEO Kevin Muller, argues that most organizations are not served well by what he argues are more consumer-oriented tools like Bitwarden or 1Password. “You look at Bitwarden, for example, or even 1Password, what they are doing is they have, at one end, a simple password management for the workforce, and then they built a secret manager — or they purchased a secret manager — for the DevOps teams, and then they build something else for authentication,” Muller said. “So it’s quite fragmented. And one of the problems is that these tools, most of the time, cannot talk to each other. They are very much standalone.”

The service is based, in part, on KeePass, the popular open source password manager, but as Muller stressed, KeePass was never built for them. KeePass itself is already widely popular with technical teams, but it essentially creates a single static file where credentials are securely stored, he noted. This can easily be shared among team members, but because of that, there is no way to easily control who has access to it and there is no way to audit access (or revoke it), among other things.

“What we wanted was more collaboration, more security, and more control,” Muller said. “With control I mean: How do we install it behind our firewall on a server that we manage? How do we have it interoperable? How do we share passwords, secrets, and all types of credentials granularly?”

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